Chapter III: Part 3

In looking through my Méryons, it interests me to find that a good many that are in my Solander-box to-day, belonged, long since, to distinguished Frenchmen who were Méryon’s contemporaries. Thus, a First State of the ‘Saint-Etienne-du-Mont’ was given by Méryon to Bracquemond. My impressions of the ‘Abside’ and the ‘Stryge’ belonged to Aglaüs Bouvenne, who catalogued Bonington, appreciated Méryon, and, in comparatively recent years, wrote some reminiscences of him. A ‘Rue des Toiles, à Bourges’ has on it Méryon’s dedicatory inscription, addressed to Hillemacher the painter. A curious proof of the ‘Partie de la Cité de Paris,’ before the introduction of the towers, which were never really in the actual view, though Méryon chose to see them there, came from the friend of Méryon’s youth, a friend who spoke over his grave--M. de Salicis. Some others of the prints have been Philippe Burty’s. The final trial proof of the ‘Tourelle, dite “de Marat,”’ and one or two other subjects, of which I spare the reader the details, were originally bought of Méryon by M. Wasset, a man the public wots not of, but a collector full of character: the ‘Cousin Pons,’ I dare to call him, of my own earlier day.

Let me, in a paragraph devoted to himself alone, recall M. Wasset to my memory. An employé--_secrétaire_, it may be--at the Ministry of War, he lived, when I mounted to his flat, one winter’s night (how many years ago!) in a dark, winding, narrow street, of the Rive Gauche, between the Seine and St. Sulpice--the Rue Jacob. The Cousin Pons, did I say, this gentleman resembled? But Pons was _gourmet_ as well as connoisseur--M. Wasset knew no passion but the collector’s. He dined modestly--by subscription, it was understood--at the Café Procope, in the Quarter--was _abonné_ for repasts taken there, in a haunt once classic, now dull and cheap. His rooms in the Rue Jacob, low and small, were stuffed full with his collections. _Bric-à-brac_ he had, even more than prints. Strange beings who dredged in the River, brought him ancient jewellery, and seventeenth-century watches, that had slept their Rip Van Winkle sleep in the mud of the Seine. I see the venerable collector now, his sombre and crowded rooms lit with a single lamp, and he, passing about, spare, eager, and trembling, with bowed figure; garrulous, excited as with wine, by the mere sight and handling of his accumulated possessions. A few years afterwards--urged thereto by the greatest of Parisian printsellers, Clément, who is now no more--he had a sale, in the Rue Drouot, of his hundreds of prints, of which the Méryons, of course, formed but a small part. Other treasures--then ardently desired--he was to purchase with the proceeds. Is his heart, one wonders, with those treasures now--in the dark Paris street? Or, the hands that trembled so, fifteen years since--have they relaxed their hold, for ever, of the things that were meat and drink, that were wife and child, to him?

Méryon, I remember, took me by storm as a great artistic personality, and, since he conquered me immediately, I have always been faithful to him. In that there is no sort of virtue; for has he not now become, thus early, almost everywhere, where prints are loved, an accepted classic? To appreciate Whistler--even at all to enjoy him--requires a longer education. There are even some things that at first one resents. A touch of charlatanry lurks, one at first supposes, in the Bond Street ‘arrangement in yellow and white,’ and in the _velarium_ under which we were invited to gather when the master held sway in Suffolk Street. But, in time, that impression passes. Then, one accepts the man whole--takes him as he is--genius like his has a certain licence to be abnormal. And though it pleases Mr. Whistler, in sundry catalogues and joyous little books about the ‘art of making enemies,’ to represent from time to time that I, among a hundred others, do not appreciate him, that is only because he would have us believe he is a victim to the interesting monomania of persecution, and I, forsooth, when this is his mood, am called upon to figure as one of those who would pursue and vex him. Peace! peace! Now that he has ‘done battering at England’ (I will not vouch precisely for the phrase), I am, it seems, an ‘enemy’ no more. So much the better!

I take it, he and Méryon are quite the greatest of the etchers this century has seen, and if so (since of great true etchers the Eighteenth Century was barren), they are the greatest since the days of Claude and Rembrandt. To no one who has studied any group of their plates for a single quarter of an hour, can it be necessary to insist upon the essential unlikeness of these two remarkable men. Unity of impression--almost a test of excellence, the one note dominant, the rest subordinated--that is found, I know, and found almost equally, in the work of both. But by what different measures has it been maintained! Whistler, in so much of his work, has shown himself the flexible, vivacious, and consummate sketcher, the artist whose choice of economical and telling ‘line’ is faultless and perhaps well-nigh immediate. Méryon, upon the other hand, has been remarkable for building up, with learned patience worthy of Albert Dürer, little by little, his effects; so that when the thing is done, and that sombre vision of his has become a realised performance, he has not so much made a drawing upon a plate, as erected a monument (for so it strikes one) from base to coping-stone. Such work has at least the permanence of the very monuments it records. An _œuvre de longue haleine_--a task severe and protracted--is each one of Méryon’s important coppers. Yet all the length of Méryon’s labour witnesses to no relaxing hold of his first thought, and in the great complexity of ordered line there is revealed no superfluous, no insignificant stroke.

Each man is discovered in his work. In Méryon’s ‘Abside’ say, in the ‘Pont Neuf,’ in the ‘Saint-Etienne-du Mont,’ is his brooding spirit, his patient craftsmanship, his temperament intense and profound. He was poor; he was often weary; he spent himself on his work. In Whistler’s ‘Garden,’ in his ‘Piazzetta,’ in his ‘Florence Leyland,’ in the ‘Large Pool,’ in that wonderful tiny thing, ‘The Fruit Shop,’ there is the boyish freshness, the spirit of enjoyment, which he has known how to preserve till the present time. Whistler has never been tired, or, if he has, he and his work have parted company at that moment. Wonderful as is his gift of observation and handling, his plates are a lark’s song. As you see the man before you, elastic, joyous, slim, and _débonnair_, having never known the heavy and sad wisdom of our modern youth, nor the cares of our middle age, his appearance almost persuades you that all his exquisite craftsmanship, practised now for forty years, is but the blameless recreation of an hour snatched from life’s severer tasks--the task of sipping duly, _à l’heure de l’absinthe_, one’s _apéritif_, on the Boulevard; of pulling on the River, in the long June days; of condensing every rule of life into perhaps three epigrams, effective at a dinner-party. Who would not envy this possessor of a craft fantastic, airy, and immortal! Though Mr. Whistler may entertainingly insinuate that long life has been denied to his friendships, he will agree with me, I know, when I assert that it is secured to his etchings.

That my print-drawers contain but four or five etchings by Seymour Haden is at once my misfortune and my reproach. As one looks at them one conjures up visions of bygone sales at Sotheby’s, when as yet Mr. Wilkinson, benign and aged, sat in the chair, to wield the ivory hammer--what opportunities neglected, of which the more diligent have availed themselves! For I cannot accept Seymour Haden’s too modest estimate of the value of his own work. Labour so energetic and decisive is not destined to be prized by one generation alone, and in esteeming it comparatively lightly, his connoisseurship, accurate enough when it is concerned with Claude and Rembrandt, Méryon and Whistler--all of whom, in his time, he has loved and collected--is for once at fault.

I am somewhat poor again in those etchings which are the creation of the austere genius of Legros. Popular they will never be, for Legros is almost alone among men of genius in not belonging to his own day--in receiving well-nigh no influence from the actual hour. He is a belated Old Master--but a ‘master’ always: never an affected copyist, who pranks ‘in faded antique dress.’ Had he but humoured the affectations of the time, it is quite possible that the time would at all events have talked about him, and, denied actual popularity, he might yet have been solaced by an æsthetic coterie’s hysterical admiration. But that has not been for Legros. As it is, with his gravely whispered message, his general reticence, his overmastering sense of Style, his indifference to attractive truths of detail, his scorn of the merely clever, he is placed at a disadvantage. But his work remains; not only the etchings, of which Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis catalogued a hundred and sixty-eight as long ago as 1877, but the grave pictures in which the peasant of the Boulognais devoutly worships, or in which the painted landscape is as the landscape of a dream, and the vigorous oil portraits--not one of which, perhaps, reaches the nobility of his etched portrait of Watts--and the pencil drawings of the nude, several of which Legros has given to the Museum of his birthplace, Dijon, where the stray Englishman who stays to look at them finds that they are as finely severe as are the pencil drawings of Ingres. I have his one big etching, ‘La Mort du Vagabond’--the scale too large to be effective generally, but, _pace_ Mr. Whistler, I do not, in this case, find it ‘an offence,’[4]--and amongst others, two that have, it may be, no particular rarity, but that are worthily, and I think even exceptionally, characteristic. The one is ‘La Communion dans l’Eglise Saint-Médard’: in line and in feeling an instance of the most dignified treatment of ecclesiastical function or religious office. And the other is ‘Les Chantres Espagnols,’ the singing-men, aged and decayed, eight of them, in a darkened choir--was ever a vision of narrow and of saddened lives more serious or more penetrating!

[4] ‘The huge plate,’ writes Mr. Whistler--on the whole
truthfully--‘the huge plate is an offence: its undertaking
an unbecoming display of determination and ignorance, its
accomplishment a triumph of unthinking earnestness and
uncontrolled energy.’

From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The man himself had troubles: not difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, the knowledge that he was little appreciated--for appreciation came to him early--but lack of health during years that should have been vigorous, and a compulsory flight towards the sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the distance that divided him from Death. But his work, from end to end, in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings of Jacquemart. Of Jacquemart’s two great series, the prints for his father’s _Histoire de la Porcelaine_ and those of the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ I possess only the first, and these in book form, as they were sent me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart’s publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured half-binding, done afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere are such proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasional good fortune of auction rooms--snatched in a spare half-hour--has brought to a life-long lover of engravings. There is a certain plate of sword-handles and daggers--things, some of them, that ‘rend and rip’--

‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,
Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays
Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint
devising--’

as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that lay, as I remember, at peace at last, on his own drawing-room table. How Jacquemart etched such blades! By this print of his there is one of a seventeenth-century watch--just such a watch as I said used to be fished up from the bed of the Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset--and with it the presentment of Renaissance jewel; and, perhaps, of a carved mirror, or a bit of Valenciennes porcelain.

Allow me a reflection! The cheapest way of enjoying _objets d’art_ is to enjoy them in etchings; and it is often the easiest way, since you have but to sit in your chair and look; and it is often not the least true, since the etcher himself has seen with trained eye before his trained hand came to draw. Well, to enjoy _objets d’art_ in that fashion, with tolerable completeness and extreme satisfaction, the intelligent poor man has really but to get the two chief series of Jacquemarts (those that are still lacking to me, the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me, the bigger, broader, richer, more spontaneous of the two), and those fifty plates by different etchers, of whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were among the principal, which Holloway published about a score of years since--‘Works of Art in the Collections of England.’ In that excellent folio, the men who have just been mentioned, and several others, followed hard on Jacquemart’s heels. What a treatment of jade, in some of those plates! Mr. Addington’s vase in particular--absolutely unctuous. What a treatment of _cristal de roche_! Desgoffe’s painted panel at the Luxembourg is only a little finer. What a treatment of ivory!--that extraordinary Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of Poltalloch’s.

But this is only copyist’s etching, some people may say. ‘Copyists’--No! You would not enjoy it so much, were it merely servile imitation. It is interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and vivid.

Of the original etchers of the younger school in England, Frank Short and William Strang have long seemed to me the most interesting, notwithstanding the as yet somewhat marked limitations of theme of the one, and that possessing ‘devil’ of the love of ugliness which I have now almost ceased to hope may be exorcised from the other. Strang, for all the presence of that which is repulsive to many, is a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of him, he is wildly imaginative. He is dramatic, and his prints are dramatic, however much he may profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides, there are moments in which he confesses to being a poet. He has the instinct of tragedy. Technically, his etchings are almost always good; nor is it, to my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set you thinking. I have but a few of Mr. Strang’s prints; of Frank Short’s I have more, and when he can interpret a Dewint like that ‘Road in Yorkshire,’ and a Constable like that sketch of Mr. Vaughan’s, I see no reason for not putting those mezzotints--interpretations so brilliant, translations so faithful yet so free--by the side of his work in Etching, inspired not by familiarity with the art of another, but by the presence of charming line or charming vista in Nature. Frank Short, in his original work, is a most delicate draughtsman of form in landscape. ‘Evening, Bosham,’ and ‘Sleeping till the Flood,’ sufficiently show it.

Of another good man, Mr. C. J. Watson, I have not enough to judge him at my ease; but he is a sterling etcher, distinctly gifted, and without artifice and trick. An actually imaginative vision one must not perhaps ask of him, but mental flexibility--can he but cultivate it--may enable him to go far.

‘Profil de Jeune Fille,’ a rare dry-point by Paul Helleu, has, it seems to me, like much of the work by that most modern of Parisian pastellists and etchers, a delightful spontaneity and force and freedom. It is an inevitable _chef-d’œuvre_--the greatest, perhaps, of a facile and exquisite master.

My gossip stops. Grant me only the grace of one more line, to avow the satisfaction with which, even after having enjoyed the companionship of at least some little work that is admittedly classic, I can look upon the prints of Mr. Charles Holroyd, a young etcher of our latest day. In them so much of what is generally, and often even rightly, seductive, is frankly abandoned, that they may keep unimpaired at least the distinction and reticence which are the very soul of Style.

(_Art Journal_, January and March 1894.)

ANNE OLDFIELD

‘Mrs. Oldfield, the celebrated comedian,’ is the title inscribed by a contemporary--who knew how the lady should be spoken of--upon the copper which Edward Fisher engraved in mezzotint from the picture by Richardson. A photogravure reproduction from this rare, desirable print--which shows the lissome grace and flexible charm of a young woman who enchanted the town, and who was the delight of Mr. Mainwaring before she was the delight of General Churchill--forms the frontispiece to the slight and gossipy and unscientific, but by no means disagreeable volume which Mr. Robins has compiled--we cannot say written--about the actress whom he dubs familiarly ‘Nance.’ A cheaper reproduction of another portrait of her--the original also by Richardson--is to be found upon a later page. In both portraits she is represented _in propria persona_, of which we need not complain, but which it is expedient to chronicle, inasmuch as such portraiture throws no direct illumination upon the achievements of her art. Deprived of any such assistance as might well have been given, at all events had the compiler of the volume been dealing with a comedian of later time--with Garrick, say, whose Abel Drugger is known to us by the canvas of Zoffany; with Siddons, who not only as the ‘Tragic Muse’ reveals the characteristics of her power; or even with Mrs. Abington, whose performance as Miss Prue in _Love for Love_ we seem to witness by dint of familiarity with Sir Joshua’s picture--we are thrown back entirely, for our acquaintance with Mrs. Oldfield, upon the written records produced for our survey.

These are remarkably scanty. Of the life of the fascinating woman much remains in mystery. Of the achievements of the actress there is what is called, in stilted language, ‘a consensus of opinion,’ but singularly little of definite chronicle. Certain passages in the _Spectator_ discuss the appropriateness of her delivery of a comic epilogue to a tragic play--for it was the fate of Mrs. Oldfield to act Tragedy sometimes, though she preferred, upon the whole, that the management should ‘give such things to Porter’--and a few other contemporary allusions to her were printed in her day; but her day was before the era of very penetrating criticism, either professional or not professional: no Lamb, no Hazlitt, had the chance of making her a peg for whimsicality or pungent brilliance; and the appreciative amateur who, a generation before her, had, in the diary that the world cherishes, chronicled his sense of the delightfulness of Mrs. Knipp and of Nell Gwynne--‘all unready, pretty, prettier than I thought’--was deprived by Fate of the occasion of waxing cordial over the personal grace of Mrs. Oldfield.

Accordingly, we receive from an industrious American a volume written ‘round’ Mrs. Oldfield, rather than actually about her. We cannot altogether blame him for it. We do blame him for once or twice slinking away, as it were, from the evidence of his own, perhaps unavoidable, ignorance, under cover of propriety and a regard for the conventionalities. Of this nature is his exceedingly slight treatment of the possible existence of a daughter of the actress; but he had already brought himself to chronicle some particulars of two sons--and this was perhaps as much as we could expect. Mrs. Oldfield was never married. Her time looked leniently upon such freedom as she took in love affairs; and the transference of her affection was neither frequent nor brutal. She was a woman of impulse and of sensibility and of magnetic charm. Men who ‘dined with Walpole’ passed on without a trace of consciousness of inferiority in her companionship to the agreeable converse of Oldfield. She was as kind as she was pleasant. She relieved Savage, who rose to excellence in the verses penned by him on her demise. She was endowed with common sense, which is frequently possessed, though not invariably exercised, by people of genius. She was nice to the humblest, and she walked with Royalty on the slopes of Windsor. Brought up in a third-rate street in Westminster and in a tavern in St. James’s Market, she died at her house in Grosvenor Street, in only middle age, and left a comfortable fortune to the two youths born of her connection with distinguished and superior men. Such, briefly, was the woman--mercurial, gay, and charming; bringing tears, bringing laughter, never bringing regret. Would that it were possible to write even as definitely as that of the actress and of the method of her art!

Mr. Robins, who has filled his pages with the stories of the plot of a few of her pieces and with extracts from two or three comedies in which she was presumably most brilliant, would have made his book perhaps not more generally engaging, but more instructive, had he printed from Mr. Joseph Knight’s scholarly record in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ the immense list of her _rôles_. He does, of course, speak incidentally at least of the actress’s range; but nothing convinces one of it quite so surely as the scanning of that record of her honourable labour. So far as one can tell, she must have been about at her best in _The Provoked Husband_; but, did she play Andromache or even Sophonisba, she got from each the maximum of its effect. Though poor originally, she was of gentle blood, and perhaps she played best, with her poetic realism, the parts of ladies of her day. Over a spell of twenty years, her art--like Ellen Terry’s and Mrs. Kendal’s in our own time--knew no decay. Like Aimée Desclée, she acted at the last in presence of great physical suffering. When she died the Town grieved ‘sincerely’; and though, with curious English compromise, she was refused a monument, she was not forbidden to be buried in the great grey Abbey whose walls rise cliff-like over against the street in which she passed her childhood. It is a pity that her story has been told by Mr. Robins with so naïve an absence of anything approaching style. She was a theme for a writer. But the amiable book-maker and genuinely interested student of her craft and period who is responsible for the various prolixity of this volume must be forgiven much because he has loved much. He tells us, it is true, by way of permissible yet not wholly praiseworthy padding, much more about her contemporaries in her palmy days, and in her days not palmy, than about herself. Mrs. Oldfield meanders, like a thin stream, through a meadow of Queen Anne and early Georgian gossip. We do not resent the gossip. If it is not authentic information, it is readable chatter. Would only that it were easier to disengage from the mass of it the delightful and enlivening and kindling personality of Mrs. Oldfield!

(_Literature_, 22nd October 1898.)

SIDDONS AND RACHEL

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.)

JOSEPH JEFFERSON

Joseph Jefferson has been seen again--and with all the enthusiasm of many years ago--in _Rip Van Winkle_. The playbill which announces his appearance makes no mention of Washington Irving, but claims the play as ‘written by Dion Boucicault.’ It needs, however, no very profound student to detect in that tender and graceful fancy of the story, a quality not to be numbered among the useful talents of the versatile dramatist who can give us anything that lies between _London Assurance_ and the _Shaughraun_. But I believe that, after all these years, the work of three hands is really to be found in the play; Mr. Jefferson himself having manipulated much of its action and business. He does not act the piece: he lives in it. And he is only to be compared with Got, in Balzac’s _Mercadet_. Both performances are restrained and reserved, without the appearance of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There are no dramatic outbursts, and no surprises. But in each case a character, a career--one might almost say a life itself--is put before the spectator. Greater things have undoubtedly been done upon the stage--greater things have been done on the stage of our day by Irving, and greater remain to be done by him--but nothing quite so complete has been seen: nothing giving one the sense of so easy and unlaboured a mastery. The pathos is very gentle: the humour has something of Charles Lamb in it. Jefferson has a face of the utmost good-humour; very kindly eyes, gentle ways, which win upon the children and the dumb things of his village of Falling Waters. For it is certainly his village, this Falling Waters; we cannot seriously separate the actor from the man. And he has a voice of admirable quality and compass: an enunciation of the utmost distinctness, with no perceptible mannerism, unless, indeed, the studied quietness be itself a mannerism. The voice is capable of what would be called an almost womanly tenderness, by those who have never observed that the tenderness of a man--as here to children--may be even a profounder thing.

In _Rip Van Winkle_ he plays a winning character. We have all of us a weakness for the amiable ne’er-do-well, who begins by ruining himself, and ends--much against his feeble inclination--by ruining his children and his friends. Our sympathy is wholly with him, and not with his irritated wife; and when he has drunk away his fortune, and all that he can of hers, we think that if he sits quietly under her reproaches, or makes but a gentle answer, he has atoned for everything. That is the magnetism of the lovable. And that is the kind of character that Mr. Jefferson embodies, in a manner so entirely natural that you are constantly forgetting that it is a performance. He has learned nothing by rote. He has an easy way of seeking for his words: a half-absorbed repetition of part of a phrase, as in our everyday, unchosen speech. He does not finish his sentence like an actor who has learned his lines and counted the delivery of them, and measured them to the end. The common actor winds up an address as Rossini and his school wind up a finale--‘I have the honour to remain your humble and obedient servant,’ Schumann said of them. But Mr. Jefferson’s sentences die off sometimes, or are changed a little, by a slight thing happening in his presence, or by the swift occurrence of a fresh thought which you may read in his face. It is the perfection of naturalness--the perfection of seeming spontaneity.

And if his humour is as mild as Charles Lamb’s, his pathos is as gentle as Hans Christian Andersen’s. There is the delicate suggestion, for those who can seize it--the suggestion and nothing more. When Rip goes out from the home from which his wife has at last banished him--goes out pointing to the child, in answer to his wife’s reproach that he has no part in this house: ‘You say I have no part in this house’--the pathos is of a simple and suggested kind, comparable only to Hans Andersen’s, in the _Story of a Mother_. And as there is nothing in Literature like the one, there is little on the Stage like the other.

(_Academy_, 6th November 1875.)

ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’

On Saturday I went to _Thérèse Raquin_ at the Royalty Theatre; and while I found the piece itself--as indeed I expected to find it--far less of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said, I discovered that the performance, though good and creditable, was not quite so noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is worth seeing, though--would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It is but the second piece of M. Zola’s which has found hospitality among us: nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for _L’Assommoir_ was hardly seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with fulness of horror in Charles Reade’s version _Drink_. The version of _Thérèse Raquin_--executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos, but overlooked by Mr. George Moore--does not widely depart from the original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage, have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it has been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly discarding the original at a certain point--when the bare but real equivalent of that original has once been secured--of forgetting, from that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting oneself solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is still beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of _Thérèse Raquin_ is good enough, it may be, for most people’s requirements on the stage; but it is not good enough to be counted as literature. The thing--that is--has not become Mr. De Mattos’s own: he has remained its somewhat mechanical interpreter.

_Thérèse Raquin_ occupies a middle place in M. Zola’s work. In point of date, it is early; but I mean ‘a middle place’ in that it displays neither the exaggerated and sterile realism of the uglier of the writer’s books nor the abounding poetry of the finer of them. A problem in itself less interesting than the problem of the _Page d’Amour_ is, in _Thérèse Raquin_, treated with hardly a trace of the poetic tragedy which gives the _Page d’Amour_ so much of its value. _Thérèse Raquin_ contains only one or two sentences--they are those in which the wicked little _bourgeoise_ expresses her desire to live for ever in the sunshine--which permit one to realise that its author is the author of the passionate idyl _La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_. But, on the other hand, in _Thérèse Raquin_ we are not face to face with the superfluous and unveracious hideousness of _La Terre_; and the view of humanity is not so brutal and so gross as that which is taken in _Nana_. No; in these respects we may rank _Thérèse Raquin_ rather with _L’Assommoir_ itself: in both a sad and ugly and degraded world, but a glimpse of the skies. In both--as in everything, for the matter of that, that M. Zola writes--an austere moral: the assured march of evil-doing to its own punishment.

If _Thérèse Raquin_ were simply the melodrama some of its opponents have pronounced it to be, the murder, which is the cause of the two lovers’ remorse and collapse, would have been done, not in the interval between two acts--the first of which ends and the second of which begins with a quiet game of dominoes in a Parisian parlour--but in sight of the audience, with an abundance of water in the middle of the stage, and at the back a panorama of the Seine by Asnières or Meudon. As it is, with the material circumstances of the murder we are not for one moment invited to be concerned. We are shown in one act the state of mind and feeling in which, to two people who were perhaps not born to be villains, such a solution as murder becomes possible; we are shown in another the state of mind and feeling which, in two such people, may presumably succeed to that deed of violence of which they have been guilty. The interest of these acts--different slightly from the interest of the later ones--is the interest of mental analysis; and, if these acts are melodrama, _The Ring and the Book_ is a ‘shocker.’

The intelligent, unprejudiced person who goes to see _Thérèse Raquin_, comes away with the knowledge that he has witnessed an exposition of several bitter truths--an exposition made by M. Zola with power and with singleness of aim, but here and there accompanied by a purposeless, or at the least an unsuccessful, diffuseness, which is one of the most characteristic and abiding defects of this important writer’s method. This diffuseness, this fulness of detail which is not actually illustrative and explanatory, Balzac, who was Zola’s master, had in a measure; but he had it far less than Zola. A profuse employment of the commonplace, in order that one may be ‘natural’--this avoidance of selection and rejection, when selection and rejection are of the very essence of Art--commends itself, as I understand, to a little school of criticism, or of dogmatism, which has now found voice among us; and that it does so is an entertaining evidence of the capacity of its professors for critical preachment.

(_Academy_, 24th October 1891.)

‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING

I question if _Macbeth_ can ever, in the hands of _any_ tragedian, make the same mark as _Hamlet_. _Hamlet_, as far as the opportunities for the display of the one actor are concerned, might almost have been written by an actor’s playwright of our day, bent on securing prominence for the ‘star.’ Macbeth claims little of our sympathy. Most of us wonder more at his wife, and care more for Macduff. But it is a point in Henry Irving’s art, as displayed in this play, that he brings into such high relief all that Macbeth had of noble, or of the remains of noble: reverence and awe; indignation at crimes that seemed to him baser, because they were done for pettier ends, than his own; admiration of courage in another, and of character more resolute than his; hesitation, having gone so far, to go yet further in the taking of innocent blood. Macbeth’s attitude before the prayer of the grooms; his righteous satire--‘your spirits shine through you’--on the hired murderers; his invocation to his wife; his almost tender and pitying warning to Macduff--

‘But get thee back: my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already’--

all these things show one or other of the qualities that are good in him. But other things, of course, showing the quite other qualities that have given _Macbeth_ a name, are more conspicuous and abundant: at all events are more upon the surface; and the art is great that knows how to dwell on the sympathetic and worthy, and that in doing so does much to modify the popular conception.

It may be true, of course, that the main thought of Irving in _Macbeth_ is to show the deterioration of character through one crime that brings another; but such deterioration is, after all, generally a gradual process, and there is time, while it is proceeding, to show something of the higher nature with which the character began. I think I note also, in Irving’s Macbeth, an added emphasis, not only on his belief in the supernatural, but in the power of the supernatural over him. The prophecy of the weird voices is more than ever a destiny. His crimes are done under a spell. He is moved to them from without, by a something not himself, making for Evil.

And the hold that this force from without, this supernatural power, this sense of destiny, this something not himself, making for Evil, has upon him, divides Macbeth until the very end of the action of the play, from such as his own hired murderers. Not that these, indeed, are set before us, by Shakespeare, as quite voluntary cut-throats, rejoicing in their profession; but as men rendered desperate: the one

‘Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Have so incensed, that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world’:

the other, less revengeful, yet more weary,

‘So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune,
That I would set my life on any chance,
To mend it or be rid on ’t.’

Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail to indicate--for the play itself indicates it a hundred times--how much Macbeth is separated from these, originally; but it does need some such a deep understanding of the character as seems to be Irving’s, to indicate, as time goes on, the gradual sinking to that level of theirs--the fact that the distance that divided the one from the others at the time that the one would ponder regretfully that he ‘could not say “Amen”’ when the grooms ‘said “God bless us,”’ had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by the time when Macbeth’s first greeting to an arriving messenger must needs, in his desperation, be no milder than--

‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’--

words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated angers of impending frenzy--and when his final and bloody resolution--

‘Yet I will try the last,’

is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin to the murderers’ own. And it is at least a suggestive and worthy, if not at every point a complete; stage performance that can display the half-repenting pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last, and the passages from crime to crime by which the transition is accomplished.

(_Academy_, 23rd December 1876.)

‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’

The Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and, it is to be feared, displeased many, by its production of Mr. Poel’s version of _The Duchess of Malfi_. But it is the ill-advised whom on one account or another it has now vexed; it is the wisest whom it has at last done something to satisfy. I said ‘at last.’ That was ungrateful. For, once, at least, before, the Independent Theatre--eschewing mere eccentricity and the ‘experimental’ drama (a pretty word, very, for the dull or the unseemly)--once before was it occupied with work of genius and high literary art, or with work at all events by a writer whose genius, here and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not give us, for a change, what is at all events the lucid realism of M. Zola?

And now, after a _régime_ more or less of the experimental and unnecessary, we have again a great man’s work. The Independent Theatre has once more realised that to be revolutionary is not to be sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster--Webster, it is true, with the lime-light turned on at the appropriate moment; Webster with a skirt-dance; Webster with a measure of scenic effect, dexterously shocking, or dexterously entertaining, as the case may be, to the modern taste. But still a classic--a giant in conception and writing--a strong tower in comparison with a puny earth-work. Excellently has Mr. Swinburne said of him, ‘There is no poet morally nobler than Webster.’ Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that _The Duchess of Malfi_ is ‘a masterpiece excelled only by _King Lear_.’ And, if I take down my volumes of Lamb’s _Specimens_, I find that, in a little footnote, Elia becomes most eloquent and most descriptive when he descants upon this play. ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear ... this only a Webster can do.’ And again, contrasting inferior writers with this potent if imperfect master, ‘They know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity; their affrightments are without decorum.’

But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults that were of his time, along indeed with faults, or deficiencies, that were his own. Among the latter I would note some absence of clearness in exposition. The relation of character to character, the how and wherefore of the minor events--these things are not invariably made plain: Webster himself, perhaps, could hardly have passed creditably through a searching examination in them. And among the faults, or accidents, if you will, of his time, were--one need hardly say it, but that it affects his acceptability upon the modern stage--the permitted coarseness, the absence of reticence on matters we are not accustomed to amplify and define; and, in mechanical arrangement, the frequent shifting from scene to scene within the compass of a single act--a point in which no English dramatist, as far as my remembrance carries me, went wholly right, until the trick had been learned from the French masters of construction of our own time.

Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the absence of additions, has dealt with the deficiencies of Webster’s epoch with judgment and tenderness. As far as it is possible to be so, the piece is now what on the playbill it is asserted to be--‘rearranged for the modern stage.’ And if the modern stage should turn out, after these initial performances of the new version, not quite willing to have it, that will be not so much on account of the irrepressible horrors--the modern stage has no deep-seated aversion to _them_--as on account of the limited measure of interest which that stage displays in the achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with almost baffling themes, in the vigour and affluence of literary imagination and style. The similes of Webster--pregnant, and less far-fetched than much of the imagery of his contemporaries--are rather lost upon a public and upon players who account inflation to be poetry and familiarity to be wit. ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,’ is one among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer of stately simplicity--born writer, rather than playwright--requires to be heard by those to whom the suggestive is sufficient: requires, in a word, to be met half-way along his road. Then, again, though there are hints of lightness, there is no touch of actual comedy. And when the tortures so characteristic of the Italian temperament--a temperament never more inventive than when spurred on by the motive of cruelty--when these are tried upon the long-suffering Duchess--when crazy folk yell in an adjoining chamber, and a hand that seems to her dead and cold is proffered to her where she expected a live one--an audience without imagination, without historical knowledge, versed only in the commonplace and the cockney, titters, it may be, or becomes indifferent.

Much of Mr. Poel’s best work went into the training of an intelligent company. His rehearsing ensured a certain smoothness and expressiveness of general movement. Mr. Bassett Roe bore himself with dignity and ease as the Cardinal, through whose influence--for such appears to be Mr. Poel’s reading of the situation--the forces of the Church in its bad period, the terrors of the Inquisition, are brought to bear upon the ill-fated Duchess. Mr. Murray Carson, as Daniel de Bosola, filled a great part well. Miss Mary Rorke, with a dignified presence, a rich voice completely at her service, and an unusual sense of the simplicity of pathos, was, as the Duchess, an interesting and satisfactory figure. And Miss Hall Caine filled out to completeness, by her intelligence and sunny, sympathetic style, the small part of Cariola. Some people thought the ‘Dance of Death,’ as Mr. Arthur Dillon--a learned, helpful student of the time--had cleverly devised it, was too horrible: it had to me the fascination at once of the beautiful and the _macabre_. Horrors there were in the performance, and in the piece, of necessity; but the Independent Theatre--sometimes too little in touch with the main-stream of English life and thought--may well permit itself to give a piece in which Literature is burdened with horrors. Has it not more than once indulged its supporters with things in which horrors are unburdened with Literature?

(_Academy_, 29th October 1892.)

REMBRANDT

It is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true one,--and the saying is welcome to surprise the academic and conventional--that if the painted work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his drawings were unknown, the three hundred etchings that he wrought during some forty years of labour would assert for him, amongst all capable judges, a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now admitted to occupy. It is not that in saying this I would underrate for a moment the skill of the pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who plays with subtle hue, the master of the material which is applied to prepared canvas; but that if one asks oneself, ‘What are the qualities, really, which in any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it his particular and permanent station?’ one finds shortly that one’s answer has to be the following, or something like it: ‘The qualities are an alert freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an individual vision of the world, and the knowledge how best to wield the instrument by which that vision is expressed.’

In the case of a writer, language is the instrument, and Sterne’s or Molière’s perception and sensitiveness are made evident in words. In the case of a pictorial artist, paint may be the instrument, or water-colour, or the humble but expressive pencil--or the instrument may be that which was Rembrandt’s more than any other’s: it may be the needle of the etcher.