Chapter XXVIII: A Leaf From My Journal 383 (7)

It was perhaps an auspicious portent, it certainly is an interesting fact, that the first play that was ever acted in America at a regular theatre and by a regular theatrical company was Shakespeare's comedy of _The Merchant of Venice_. Such at least is the record made by William Dunlap, the first historian of the American theatre, who names Williamsburg, Virginia, as the place and September 5, 1752 as the date of that production. It ought to be noted, however (so difficult is it to settle upon any fact in this uncertain world), that the learned antiquarian Judge C.P. Daly, fortified likewise by the scrupulously accurate Ireland, dissents from Dunlap's statement and declares that Cibber's alteration of Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_ was acted by a regular company in a large room in Nassau Street, New York, at an earlier date, namely, on March 5, 1750. All the same, it appears to have been Shakespeare's mind that started the dramatic movement in America. The American stage has undergone great changes since that time, but both _The Merchant of Venice_ and _Richard the Third_ are still acted, and in the _Merchant_, if not in _Richard_, the public interest is still vital. In New York, under Edwin Booth's management, at the Winter Garden theatre, January 28, 1867, and subsequently at Booth's theatre, and in London, under Henry Irving's management, at the Lyceum theatre, November 1, 1879, sumptuous productions of the _Merchant_ have brilliantly marked the dramatic chronicle of our times. Discussion of the great character of Shylock steadily proceeds and seems never to weary either the disputants or the audience. The sentiment, the fancy, and the ingenuity of artists are often expended not only upon the austere, picturesque, and terrible figure of the vindictive Jew, but upon the chief related characters in the comedy--upon Bassanio and Portia, Gratiano and Nerissa, Lorenzo and Jessica, the princely and pensive Antonio, the august Duke and his stately senators, and the shrewd and humorous Gobbo. More than one painting has depicted the ardent Lorenzo and his fugitive infidel as they might have looked on that delicious summer night at Belmont when they saw "how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," and when the blissful lover, radiant with happiness and exalted by the sublime, illimitable, unfathomable spectacle of the star-strewn firmament, murmured, in such heaven-like cadence, of the authentic music of heaven.

It is not to be denied that lovely words are spoken to Jessica, and that almost equally lovely words are spoken by her. Essayists upon the _Merchant_ have generally accepted her without a protest--so much do youth and beauty in a woman count in the scale when weighed against duty and integrity. There is no indication that Shylock was ever unjust or unkind to Jessica. Whatever he may have been to others he seems always to have been good to her; and she was the child of that lost Leah of his youthful devotion whom he passionately loved and whom he mourned to the last. Yet Jessica not only abandoned her father and his religion, but robbed him of money and jewels (including the betrothal ring, the turquoise, that her mother had given to him), when she fled with the young Christian who had won her heart. It was a basely cruel act; but probably some of the vilest and cruelest actions that are done in this world are done by persons who are infatuated by the passion of love. Mrs. Jameson, who in her beautiful essay on Portia extenuates the conduct of Jessica, would have us believe that Shylock valued his daughter far beneath his wealth, and therefore deserved to be deserted and plundered by her; and she is so illogical as to derive his sentiments on this subject from his delirious outcries of lamentation after he learned of her predatory and ignominious flight. The argument is not a good one. Fine phrases do not make wrong deeds right. It were wiser to take Jessica for the handsome and voluptuous girl that certainly she is, and to leave her rectitude out of the question. Shakespeare in his drawing of her was true to nature, as he always is; but the student who wants to know where Shakespeare's heart was placed when he drew women must look upon creatures very different from Jessica. The women that Shakespeare seems peculiarly to have loved are Imogen, Cordelia, Isabella, Rosalind, and Portia--Rosalind, perhaps, most of all; for although Portia is finer than Rosalind, it is extremely probable that Shakespeare resembled his fellow-men sufficiently to have felt the preference that Tom Moore long afterward expressed:

"Be an angel, my love, in the morning,
But, oh! be a woman to-night."

When Ellen Terry embodied Portia--in Henry Irving's magnificent revival of _The Merchant of Venice_--the essential womanhood of that character was for the first time in the modern theatre adequately interpreted and conveyed. Upon many play-going observers indeed the wonderful wealth of beauty that is in the part--its winsome grace, its incessant sparkle, its alluring because piquant as well as luscious sweetness, its impetuous ardour, its enchantment of physical equally with emotional condition, its august morality, its perfect candour, and its noble passion--came like a surprise. Did the great actress find those attributes in the part (they asked themselves), or did she infuse them into it? Previous representatives of Portia had placed the emphasis chiefly, if not exclusively, upon morals and mind. The stage Portia of the past has usually been a didactic lady, self-contained, formal, conventional, and oratorical. Ellen Terry came, and Portia was figured exactly as she lives in the pages of Shakespeare--an imperial and yet an enchanting woman, dazzling in her beauty, royal in her dignity, as ardent in temperament as she is fine in brain and various and splendid in personal peculiarities and feminine charm. After seeing that matchless impersonation it seemed strange that Portia should ever have been represented in any other light, and it was furthermore felt that the inferior, mechanical, utilitarian semblance of her could not again be endured. Ellen Terry's achievement was a complete vindication of the high view that Shakespearean study has almost always taken of that character, and it finally discredited the old stage notion that Portia is a type of decorum and declamation.

Aside from Hazlitt, who thought that Portia is affected and pedantic, and who did not like her because he did not happen to appreciate her, the best analytical thinkers about Shakespeare's works have taken the high view of that character. Shakespeare himself certainly took it; for aside from her own charming behaviour and delightful words it is to be observed that everybody in the play who speaks of her at all speaks her praise. It is only upon the stage that she has been made artificial, prim, and preachy. That misrepresentation of her has, perhaps, been caused, in part, by the practice long prevalent in our theatre of cutting and compressing the play so as to make Shylock the chief figure in it. In that way Portia is shorn of much of her splendour and her meaning. The old theatrical records dwell almost exclusively upon Shylock, and say little if anything about Portia. In Shakespeare's time, no doubt, _The Merchant of Venice_ was acted as it is written, the female persons in it being played by boys, or by men who could "speak small." Alexander Cooke (1588-1614) played the light heroines of Shakespeare while the poet was alive. All students of the subject are aware that Burbage was the first Shylock, and that when he played the part he wore a red wig, a red beard, and a long false nose. No record exists as to the first Portia. The men who were acting female characters upon the London stage when that institution was revived immediately after the Restoration were Kynaston, James Nokes, Angel, William Betterton, Mosely, and Floid. Kynaston, it is said, could act a woman so well that when at length women themselves began to appear as actors it was for some time doubted whether any one of them could equal him. The account of his life, however, does not mention Portia as one of his characters.

Indeed the play of _The Merchant of Venice_, after it languished out of sight in that decadence of the stage which ensued upon the growth of the Puritan movement in England, did not again come into use until it was revived in Lord Landsdowne's alteration of it produced at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1701, and even then it was grossly perverted. Forty years later, however, on St. Valentine's Day 1741, at Drury Lane, when Macklin regenerated the character of Shylock, the original piece was restored to the theatre. Women in the meantime had come upon the stage. The garrulous and delightful Pepys, who had seen Kynaston play a female part, records in his marvellous Diary that he first saw women as actors on January 3, 1661. Those were members of Killigrew's company, which preceded that of Davenant by several months, if not by a year; and therefore the common statement in theatrical books that the first woman that ever appeared on the English stage was Mrs. Sanderson, of Davenant's company, at Lincoln's Inn Fields, is erroneous: and indeed the name of the first English actress is as much unknown as the name of the first Portia. When Macklin restored Shakespeare's _Merchant of Venice_ to the stage it is not likely that the character of Portia was dwarfed, for its representative then was Kitty Clive, and that actress was a person of strong will. With Clive the long list begins of the Portias of the stage. She was thirty years old when she played the part with Macklin, and it is probable that she played it with dignity and certain that she played it with sparkling animation and piquant grace. The German Ulrici, whose descriptive epithets for Portia are "roguish and intellectual," would doubtless have found his ideal of the part fulfilled in Clive. The Nerissa that night was Mrs. Pritchard, then also thirty years old, but not so famous as she afterward became.

The greatest actress on the British stage in the eighteenth century undoubtedly was Margaret Woffington (1719-1760). Sarah Siddons, to whom the sceptre passed, was only five years old when Woffington died. Both those brilliant names are associated with Portia. Augustin Daly's _Life of Woffington_--the best life of her that has been written, and one of the most sumptuous books that have been made--contains this reference to her performance of that part: "All her critics agree that her declamation was accurate and her gesture grace and nature combined; but in tragic or even dramatic speeches her voice probably had its limits, and in such scenes, being overtaxed, told against her. As Portia she appeared to great advantage; but when Lorenzo says, 'This is the voice, or I am much deceived, of Portia,' and Portia replies, 'He knows me, as the blind man knows the cuckoo, by the bad voice,' the audience laughed outright, and Woffington, conscious of her deficiency, with great good-humour joined with them in their merriment." The incident is mentioned in the _Table Talk_ (1825) of Richard Ryan, to which book Daly refers. Mrs. Siddons made her first appearance on the London stage as Portia December 29, 1775, and conspicuously failed in the part on that occasion, but she became distinguished in it afterward; yet it is probable that Mrs. Siddons expressed its nobility more than its tenderness, and much more than its buoyant and glittering glee, which was so entirely and beautifully given by Ellen Terry. After Peg Woffington and before Mrs. Siddons the most conspicuous Portia was Mrs. Dancer, whom Hugh Kelley, in his satirical composition of _Thespis_, calls a "moon-eyed idiot,"--from which barbarous bludgeon phrase the reader derives a hint as to her aspect. Some of the tones of Mrs. Dancer's voice were so tender that no one could resist them. Spranger Barry could not, for he married her, and after his death she became Mrs. Crawford. Miss Maria Macklin, daughter of the first true Shylock of the stage, acted Portia, April 13, 1776, with her father. She is recorded as an accomplished woman but destitute of genius--in which predicament she probably was not lonesome. On June 11, 1777 Portia was acted at the Haymarket by Miss Barsanti, afterward Mrs. Lister, an actress who, since she excelled in such parts as were customarily taken by Fanny Abington (the distinct opposite of Portia-like characters), must have been unsuited for it. The names of Miss Younge, Miss Farren, Miss E. Kemble, Miss Ryder, Mrs. Pope, Miss De Camp, and Miss Murray are in the record of the stage Portias that comes down to 1800. Probably the best of all those Portias was Mrs. Pope.

The beautiful Mrs. Glover played Portia in 1809 at the Haymarket theatre. Mrs. Ogilvie played it, with Macready as Shylock (his first appearance in that part), on May 13, 1823. Those figures passed and left no shadow. Two English actresses of great fame are especially associated with Portia--Ellen Tree, afterward Mrs. Charles Kean, and Helen Faucit, now Lady Martin; and no doubt their assumptions of the part should be marked as exceptions from the hard, didactic, declamatory, perfunctory method that has customarily characterised the Portia of the stage. Lady Martin's written analysis of Portia is noble in thought and subtle and tender in penetration and sympathy. Charlotte Cushman read the text superbly, but she was much too formidable ever to venture on assuming the character. Portia is a woman who deeply loves and deeply rejoices and exults in her love, and she is never ashamed of her passion or of her exultation in it; and she says the finest things about love that are said by any of Shakespeare's women; the finest because, while supremely passionate, the feeling in them is perfectly sane. It is as a lover that Ellen Terry embodied her, and while she made her a perfect woman, in all the attributes that fascinate, she failed not, in the wonderful trial scene, to invest her with that fine light of celestial anger--that momentary thrill of moral austerity--which properly appertains to the character at the climax of a solemn and almost tragical situation.

On the American stage there have been many notable representatives of the chief characters in _The Merchant of Venice_. In New York, when the comedy was done at the old John Street theatre in 1773, Hallam was Shylock and Mrs. Morris Portia. Twenty years afterward, at the same house, Shylock was played by John Henry, and Portia by Mrs. Henry, while the brilliant Hodgkinson appeared as Gratiano. Cooper, whose life has been so well written by that ripe theatrical scholar Joseph N. Ireland, in one of the books of the Dunlap Society, assumed Shylock in 1797 at the theatre just then opened in Greenwich Street. The famous Miss Brunton (then Mrs. Merry), was the Portia, and the cast included Moreton as Bassanio, Warren as Antonio, Bernard as Gratiano, and Blissett as Tubal. How far away and how completely lost and forgotten those once distinguished and admired persons are! Yet Cooper in his day was idolised: he had a fame as high, if not as widely spread, as that of Henry Irving or Edwin Booth at present. William Creswick--lately dead at an advanced age in London--was seen upon the New York stage as Shylock in 1840; Macready in 1841; Charles Kean in 1845. With the latter, Ellen Tree played Portia. Charles W. Couldock enacted Shylock on September 6, 1852, at the Castle Garden theatre, in a performance given to commemorate the alleged centenary of the introduction of the drama into America. The elder Wallack, the elder Booth, Edwin Forrest, G.V. Brooke, George Vandenhoff, Wyzeman Marshall, and E.L. Davenport are among the old local representatives of the Jew. Madam Ponisi used to play Portia, and so did Mrs. Hoey.

In December 1858, when _The Merchant of Venice_ was finely revived at Wallack's theatre, with the elder Wallack as Shylock, the cast included Lester Wallack as Bassanio, John Brougham as Gratiano, A. W. Young--a quaintly comic actor, too soon cut off--as Launcelot Gobbo, Mary Gannon--the fascinating, the irresistible--as Nerissa, and handsome Mrs. Sloan as Jessica. The eminent German actor Davison played Shylock, in New York, in his own language; and many German actors, no one of them comparable with him, have been seen in it since. Lawrence Barrett often played it, and with remarkable force and feeling. The triumphs won in it by Edwin Booth are within the remembrance of many playgoers of this generation. When he last acted the Jew Helena Modjeska was associated with him as Portia. Booth customarily ended the piece with the trial scene, omitting the last act; and indeed that was long the stage custom; but with the true Portia of Ellen Terry and a good cast in general the last act went blithely and with superb effect. The comedy was not written for Shylock alone. He is a tremendous identity, but he is not the chief subject. The central theme is Portia and her love. That theme takes up a large part of the play,--which is like a broad summer landscape strewn with many-coloured flowers that flash and glitter in the sun, while slowly a muttering thunder-storm gathers and lowers, and presently sweeps overhead, casting one black shadow as it passes, and leaving the fragrant and glistening plain all the brighter and sweeter for the contrast with its defeated menace and vanishing gloom.

XX.

RICHARD MANSFIELD AS RICHARD THE THIRD.

The ideal of Richard that was expressed by this actor did not materially differ from that which has been manifested by great tragic actors from Garrick to Booth. He embodied a demoniac scoffer who, nevertheless, is a human being. The infernal wickedness of Richard was shown to be impelled by tremendous intellect but slowly enervated and ultimately thwarted and ruined by the cumulative operation of remorse--corroding at the heart and finally blasting the man with desolation and frenzy. That, undoubtedly, was Shakespeare's design. But Richard Mansfield's expression of that ideal differed from the expression to which the stage has generally been accustomed, and in this respect his impersonation was distinctive and original.

The old custom of playing Richard was to take the exaggerated statements of the opening soliloquy in a literal sense, to provide him with a big hump, a lame leg, and a fell of straight black hair, and to make him walk in, scowling, with his lower lip protruded, and declare with snarling vehemence and guttural vociferation his amiable purpose of specious duplicity and miscellaneous slaughter. The opening speech, which is in Shakespeare's juvenile manner--an orotund, verbose manner, which perhaps he had caught from Marlowe, and which he outgrew and abandoned--was thus utilised for displaying the character in a massed aspect, as that of a loathsome hypocrite and sanguinary villain; and, that being done, he was made to advance through about two-thirds of the tragedy, airily yet ferociously slaying everybody who came in his way, until at some convenient point, definable at the option of the actor, he was suddenly smitten with a sufficient remorse to account for his trepidation before and during the tent-scene; and thereafter he was launched into combat like a meteoric butcher, all frenzy and all gore, and killed, amid general acclamation, when he had fenced himself out of breath.

That treatment of the character was, doubtless, in part a necessary consequence of Shakespeare's perfunctory adoption of the Tudor doctrine that Richard was a blood-boltered monster; but in a larger degree it was the result of Cibber's vulgar distortion of the original piece. The actual character of the king,--who seems to have been one of the ablest and wisest monarchs that ever reigned in England--has never recovered, and it never will recover, from the odium that was heaped upon it by the Tudor historians and accepted and ratified by the great genius of Shakespeare. The stage character of the king has been almost as effectually damned by the ingenious theatrical claptrap with which Cibber misrepresented and vulgarised Shakespeare's conception, assisted by the efforts of a long line of blood-and-thunder tragedians, only too well pleased to depict a gory, blathering, mugging miscreant, such as their limited intelligence enabled them to comprehend. The stage Richard, however, may possibly be redeemed. In Cibber he is everything that Queen Margaret calls him, and worse than a brute. In Shakespeare, although a miscreant, he is a man. The return to Shakespeare, accordingly, is a step in the right direction. That step was taken some time ago, although not maintained, first by Macready, then by Samuel Phelps, then by Edwin Booth, and then by Henry Irving. Their good example was followed by Richard Mansfield. He used a version of the tragedy, made by himself,--a piece indicative of thoughtful study of the subject as well as a keen intuitive grasp of it. He did not stop short at being a commentator. Aiming to impersonate a character he treated Shakespeare's prolix play in such a manner as to make it a practicable living picture of a past age. The version was in five acts, preserving the text of the original, much condensed, and introducing a few lines from Cibber. It began with a bright processional scene before the Tower of London, in which Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., was conspicuous, and against that background of "glorious summer" it placed the dangerous figure of the Duke of Gloster. It comprised the murder of Henry VI., the wooing of Lady Anne,--not in a London street, but in a rural place, on the road to Chertsey; the lamentation for King Edward IV.; the episode of the boy princes; the condemnation of Hastings,--a scene that brilliantly denotes the mingled artifice and savagery of Shakespeare's Gloster; the Buckingham plot; the priest and mayor scene; the temptation of Tyrrel; the fall of Buckingham; the march to battle; the episode of the spectres; and the fatal catastrophe on Bosworth Field. Enough of the story was thus related to satisfy the Shakespeare scholar.

The notable peculiarity was the assumption that there are considerable lapses of time at intervals during the continuance of the story. The effort to reconcile poetry with history produced little if any appreciable practical result upon the stage,--seeing that an audience would not think of lapses of time unless those lapses were mentioned in the play-bill. An incessant continuity of action, a ceaseless rush and whirl of events, is the essential life of the play. No auditor can feel that Richard has waited twelve years before making any movement or striking any blow, after his aspiration that heaven will take King Edward and leave the world for him "to bustle in." That word "bustle" is a favourite word with Richard. And furthermore there is no development of his character in Shakespeare's play: there is simply the presentation of it, complete and rounded at the outset, and remaining invariably and inflexibly the same to the close.

Mansfield, however, deduced this effect from his consideration of the flight of time: a contrast between Richard at nineteen and Richard at thirty-three, a contrast strongly expressive of the reactionary influence that an experience of evil deeds has produced upon a man who at first was only a man of evil thoughts and evil will. This imported into the performance a diversity of delineation without, however, affecting the formidable weight of the figure of Richard, or its brilliancy, or its final significance. The embodiment was splendid with it, and would be just as splendid without it. The presence of heart and conscience in that demoniac human creature is denoted by Shakespeare and must be shown by the actor. Precisely at what point his heaven-defying will should begin to waver is not defined. Mansfield chose to indicate the operation of remorse and terror in Richard's soul as early as the throne scene and before yet the king has heard that the royal boys have been murdered. The effect of his action, equally with the method of it, was magnificent. You presently saw him possessed of the throne for which he had so terribly toiled and sinned, and alone upon it, bathed in blood-red light, the pitiable personification of gorgeous but haunted evil, marked off from among mankind and henceforth desolate. Throughout that fine scene Mansfield's portrayal of the fearful struggle between wicked will and human weakness was in a noble vein of imagination, profound in its sincerity, affecting in its pathos, and pictorial in its treatment. In the earlier scenes his mood and his demeanour had been suffused with a cool, gay, mockery of elegant cynicism. He killed King Henry with a smile, in a scene of gloomy mystery that might have come from the pencil of Gustave Dore. He looked upon the mourning Lady Anne with cheerful irony and he wooed her with all the fervour that passion and pathos can engender in the behaviour of a hypocrite. His dissimulation with the princes and with the mayor and the nobles was to the last degree specious. One of his finest points was the temptation of Buckingham to murder the princes. There, and indeed at all points, was observed the absence of even the faintest reminiscence of the ranting, mouthing, flannel-jawed king of clubs who has so generally strutted and bellowed as Shakespeare's Gloster. All was bold and telling in the manner, and yet the manner was reticent with nature and fine with well-bred continence.

With the throne scene began the spiritual conflict. At least it then began to be disclosed; and from that moment onward the state of Richard was seen to be that of Orestes pursued by the furies. But Mansfield was right, and was consistent, in making the monarch faithful in his devotion to evil. Richard's presentiments, pangs, and tremors are intermittent. In the great, empty, darkening throne-room, with its shadowy nooks and dim corners, shapeless and nameless spectres may momentarily come upon him and shake his strong spirit with the sinister menace of hell. Along the dark plains, on the fateful night before the battle, the sad ghosts may drift and wander, moaning and wailing in the ghastly gloom; and in that hour of haunted desolation the doomed king may feel that, after all, he is but mortal man, and that his pre-ordered destruction is close at hand and not to be averted; but Richard never deceives himself; never palters with the goodness that he has scorned. He dies as he has lived, defiant and terrible.

Mansfield's treatment of the ghost scenes at Bosworth was novel, original, and poetic, and his death scene was not only a display of personal prowess but a reproduction of historical fact. With a detail like this the truth of history becomes useful, but in general the actor cannot safely go back of the Shakespearean scheme. To present Richard as he probably was would be to present a man of some virtue as well as great ability. Mansfield's acting revealed an amiable desire to infuse as much goodness as possible into the Shakespearean conception, but he obtained his chief success by acting the part substantially according to Shakespeare and by setting and dressing the play with exceptional if not altogether exact fidelity to the time, the places, and the persons that are implicated in the story.

Shakespeare's Richard is a type of colossal will and of restless, inordinate, terrific activity. The objects of his desire and his effort are those objects which are incident to supreme power; but his chief object is that assertion of himself which is irresistibly incited and steadfastly compelled by the overwhelming, seething, acrid energy of his feverish soul, burning and raging in his fiery body. He can no more help projecting himself upon the affairs of the world than the malignant cobra can help darting upon its prey. He is a vital, elemental force, grisly, hectic, terrible, impelled by volcanic heat and electrified and made lurid and deadly by the infernal purpose of restless wickedness. No actor can impersonate Richard in an adequate manner who does not possess transcendent force of will, combined with ambitious, incessant, and restless mental activity. Mansfield in those respects is qualified for the character, and out of his professional resources he was able to supply the other elements that are requisite to its constitution and fulfilment. He presented as Richard a sardonic, scoffing demon, who nevertheless, somewhere in his complex nature, retains an element of humanity. He embodied a character that is tragic in its ultimate effect, but his method was that of the comedian. His portrayal of Richard, except at those moments when it is veiled with craft and dissimulation, or at those other and grander moments, infrequent but awful and agonising, when it is convulsed with terror or with the anguish of remorse, stood forth boldly in the sunshine, a crystallised and deadly sarcasm, equally trenchant upon itself and all the world, equally scornful of things human and things divine. That deadly assumption of keen and mordant mockery, that cool, glittering, malignant lightness of manner, was consistently sustained throughout the performance, while the texture of it was made continuously entertaining by diversity of colour and inflection, sequent on changing moods; so that Richard was shown as a creature of the possible world of mankind and not as a fiction of the stage.

The part was acted by him: it was not declaimed. He made, indeed, a skilful use of his uncommon voice--keeping its tones light, sweet, and superficial during the earlier scenes (while yet, in accordance with his theory of development, Gloster is the personification of evil purpose only beginning to ripen into evil deed), and then permitting them to become deeper and more significant and thrilling as the man grows old in crime and haggard and convulsed in self-conflict and misery. But it was less with vocal excellence that the auditor was impressed than with the actor's identification with the part and his revelation of the soul of it. When first presented Gloster was a mocking devil. The murder of King Henry was done with malice, but the malice was enwrapped with glee. In the wooing of Lady Anne there was both heart and passion, but the mood was that of lightsome duplicity. It is not until years of scheming and of evil acts, engendering, promoting, and sustaining a condition of mental horror and torture, have ravaged his person and set their seal upon him, in sunken cheek and hollow eye, in shattered nerves and deep and thrilling voice, surcharged at once with inveterate purpose and with incessant agony, that this light manner vanishes, and the demeanour and action of the wicked monarch becomes ruthless, direct, and terrible. Whether, upon the basis of a play so discursive, so episodical, so irresolutely defined as Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_, that theory of the development of its central character is logically tenable is a dubious question. In Shakespeare the character is presented full-grown at the start, and then, through a confused tangle of historical events, is launched into action. Nevertheless in his practical application of it Mansfield made his theory effective by a novel, powerful, interesting performance. You could not help perceiving in Mansfield's embodiment that Gloster was passing through phases of experience--that the man changed, as men do change in life, the integral character remaining the same in its original fibre, but the condition varying, in accordance with the reaction of conduct upon temperament and conscience.

Mansfield deeply moved his audience in the repulse of Buckingham, in the moody menace of the absent Stanley, in the denunciation of Hastings, and in the awakening from the dream on the night before the battle. Playgoers have seldom seen a dramatic climax so thrilling as his hysterical recognition of Catesby, after the moment of doubt whether this be not also a phantom of his terrific dream. It was not so much by startling theatrical effects, however, as by subtle denotements, now of the tempest and now of the brooding horror in the king's heart, that the actor gained his victory. The embodiment lacked incessant fiery expedition--the explosive, meteoric quality that astounds and dazzles. Chief among the beauties was imagination. The attitude of the monarch toward his throne--the infernal triumph, and yet the remorseful agony and withering fear--in the moment of ghastly loneliness when he knows that the innocent princes have been murdered and that his imperial pathway is clear, made up one of the finest spectacles of dramatic illumination that the stage has afforded. You saw the murderer's hideous exultation, and then, in an instant, as the single ray of red light from the setting sun streamed through the Gothic window and fell upon his evil head, you saw him shrink in abject fear, cowering in the shadow of his throne; and the dusky room was seemingly peopled with gliding spectres. That treatment was theatrical, but in no derogatory sense theatrical--for it comports with the great speech on conscience; not the fustian of Cibber, about mutton and short-lived pleasure, but the speech that Shakespeare has put into Richard's mouth; the speech that inspired Mansfield's impersonation--the brilliant embodiment of an intellectual man, predisposed to evil, who yields to that inherent impulse, and thereafter, although intermittently convulsed with remorse, fights with tremendous energy against the goodness that he scorns and defies, till at last he dashes himself to pieces against the adamant of eternal law.

XXI.

GENEVIEVE WARD: FORGET ME NOT.

In the season of 1880-81 Genevieve Ward made a remarkably brilliant hit with her embodiment of Stephanie De Mohrivart, in the play of _Forget 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 consist in 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, brilliant though 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 sow the 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 Not_ tells 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 that incisive, 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 of _Forget 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.

XXII.

EDWARD S. WILLARD IN THE MIDDLEMAN AND JUDAH.

E.S. Willard accomplished his first appearance upon the American stage (at Palmer's theatre, November 10, 1890), in the powerful play of _The 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. In no 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, the quality 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 just so 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 of sweeping 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 of _The Middleman_ Willard 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 of hunger 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 the heart. 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 by _The Middleman_ is that of moral 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 Middleman_ was 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. _Judah_ is 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.