Chapter XXVIII: A Leaf From My Journal 383 (8)

That theme is the psychic force in human organism. The author does not obtrude it; does not play the pedant with it; does not lecture upon it; and above all does not bore with it. He only uses it; and he has been so true to his province as a dramatist and not an advocate that he never once assumes to decide upon any question of doctrine that may be involved in the assertion of it. His heroine is a young woman who thinks herself to be possessed of a certain inherent restorative power of curing the sick. This power is of psychic origin and it operates through the medium of personal influence. This girl, Vashti Dethick, has exerted her power with some success. Other persons, having felt its good effect, have admitted its existence. The father of Vashti, an enterprising scamp, has thereupon compelled the girl to trade upon her peculiar faculty; little by little to assume miraculous powers; and finally to pretend that her celestial talent is refreshed and strengthened by abstinence from food, and that her cures are wrought only after she has fasted for many days. He has thus converted her into an impostor; yet, as her heart is pure and her moral principle naturally sound, she is ill at ease in this false position, and her mental distress has suddenly become aggravated, almost to the pitch of desperation, by the arrival of love. She has lost her heart to a young clergyman, Judah Llewellyn, the purity of whose spirit and the beauty of whose life are a bitter and burning rebuke to her enforced deceitfulness of conduct. Here is a woman innocently guilty, suddenly aroused by love, made sensitive and noble (as that passion commonly makes those persons who really feel it), and projected into a condition of aggrieved excitement. In this posture of romantic and pathetic circumstances the crisis of two lives is suddenly precipitated in action.

Judah Llewellyn also is possessed of spiritual sensibility and psychic force. In boyhood a shepherd, he has dwelt among the mountains of his native Wales, and his imagination has heard the voices that are in rocks and trees, in the silence of lonely places, in the desolation of the bleak hills, and in the cold light of distant stars. He is now a preacher, infatuated with his mission, inspired in his eloquence, invincible in his tremendous sincerity. He sees Vashti and he loves her. It is the first thrill of mortal passion that ever has mingled with his devotion to his Master's work. The attraction between these creatures is human; and yet it is more of heaven than of earth. It is a tie of spiritual kindred that binds them. They are beings of a different order from the common order--and, as happens in such cases, they will be tried by exceptional troubles and passed through a fire of mortal anguish. For what reason experience should take the direction of misery with fine natures in human life no philosopher has yet been able to ascertain; but that it does take that direction all competent observation proves. To Vashti and Judah the time speedily comes when their love is acknowledged, upon both sides--the preacher speaking plainly; the girl, conscious of turpitude, shrinking from a spoken avowal which yet her whole personality proclaims. Yielding to her father's malign will she has consented to make one more manifestation of curative power, to go through once more,--and for the last time,--the mockery of a pretended fast. The scene is Lord Asgarby's house; the patient is Lord Asgarby's daughter--an only child, cursed with constitutional debility, the foredoomed victim of premature decline. This frail creature has heard of Vashti and believes in her, and desires and obtains her society. To Professor Dethick this is, in every sense, a golden opportunity, and he insists that the starvation test shall be thoroughly made. Lord Asgarby, willing to do anything for his idolised daughter, assents to the plan, and his scientific friend, cynical Professor Jopp, agrees, with the assistance of his erudite daughter, to supervise the experiment. Vashti will fast for several days, and the heir of Asgarby will then be healed by her purified and exalted influence.

The principal scene of the play shows the exterior of an ancient, unused tower of Asgarby House, in which Vashti is detained during the fast. The girl is supposed to be starving. Her scampish father will endeavour to relieve her. Miss Jopp is vigilant to prevent fraud. The patient is confident. Judah, wishful to be near to the object of his adoration, has climbed the outer wall and is watching, beneath the window, unseen, in the warder's seat. The time is summer, the hour midnight, and the irrevocable vow of love has been spoken. At that supreme instant, and under conditions so natural that the picture seems one of actual life, the sin of Vashti is revealed and the man who had adored her as an angel knows her for a cheat. With a difference of circumstances that situation--in the fibre of it--is not new. Many a lover, male and female, has learned that every idol has its flaw. But the situation is new in its dramatic structure. For Judah the discovery is a terrible one, and the resultant agony is convulsive and lamentable. He takes, however, the only course he could be expected to take: he must vindicate the integrity of the woman whom he loves, and he commits the crime of perjury in order to shield her reputation from disgrace.

What will a man do for the woman whom he loves? The attributes of individual character are always to be considered as forces likely to modify passion and to affect conduct. But in general the answer to that question may be given in three words--anything and everything! The history of nations, as of individuals, is never rightly read until it is read in the light of knowledge of the influence that has been exerted over them by women. Cleopatra, in ancient Egypt, changed the history of Rome by the ruin of Marc Antony. Another heroine recently toppled Ireland down the fire-escape into the back-yard. So goes the world. In Judah, however, the crime that is done for love is pursued to its consequence of ever-accumulative suffering, until at length, when it has been expiated by remorse and repentance, it is rectified by confession and obliterated by pardon. No play ever taught a lesson of truth with more cogent dramatic force. The cynical, humorous scenes are delightful.

Willard's representation of Cyrus Blenkarn stamped him as one of the best actors of the age. His representation of Judah Llewellyn deepened that impression and reinforced it with a conviction of marked versatility. In his utterance of passion Willard showed that he has advanced far beyond the Romeo stage. The love that he expressed was that of a man--intellectual, spiritual, noble, a moral being and one essentially true. Man's love, when it is real, adores its object; hallows it; invests it with celestial attributes; and beholds it as a part of heaven. That quality of reverence was distinctly conveyed by the actor, and therefore to observers who conceive passion to be delirious abandonment (of which any animal is capable), his ardour may have seemed dry and cold. It was nevertheless true. He made the tempestuous torrent of Judah's avowal the more overwhelming by his preliminary self-repression and his thoughtful gentleness of reserve; for thus the hunger of desire was beautiful with devotion and tenderness; and while the actor's feelings seemed borne away upon a whirling tide of irresistible impulse his exquisite art kept a perfect control of face, voice, person, demeanour, and delivery, and not once permitted a lapse into extravagance. The character thus embodied will long be remembered as an image of dignity, sweetness, moral enthusiasm, passionate fervour, and intellectual power; but, also, viewed as an effort in the art of acting, it will be remembered as a type of consummate grace in the embodiment of a beautiful ideal clearly conceived. The effect of spiritual suffering, as conveyed in the pallid countenance and ravaged figure, in the last act, was that of noble pathos. The delivery of all the speeches of the broken, humiliated, haunted minister was deeply touching, not alone in music of voice but in denotement of knowledge of human nature and human suffering and endurance. The actor who can play such a part in such a manner is not an experimental artist. Rather let him be called--in the expressive words of one of his country's poets--

"Sacred historian of the heart
And moral nature's lord."

XXIII.

SALVINI AS KING SAUL AND KING LEAR.

Salvini was grander and finer in King Saul than in any other embodiment that he presented. He seized the idea wholly, and he executed it with affluent power. He brought to the part every attribute necessary to its grandeur of form and its afflicting sympathy of spirit. His towering physique presented, with impressive accuracy, the Hebrew monarch, chosen of God, who was "lifted a head and shoulders above the people." His tremulous sensibility, his knowledge of suffering, his skill in depicting it, his great resources of voice, his vigour and fineness of action, his exceptional commingling of largeness and gentleness--all these attributes combined in that performance, to give magnificent reality to one of the most sublime conceptions in literature. By his personation of Saul Salvini added a new and an immortal figure to the stage pantheon of kings and heroes.

Alfieri's tragedy of _Saul_ was written in 1782-83, when the haughty, impetuous, and passionate poet was thirty-four years old, and at the suggestion of the Countess of Albany, whom he loved. He had suffered a bereavement at the time, and he was in deep grief. The Countess tried to console him by reading the Bible, and when they came upon the narrative of Saul the idea of the tragedy was struck out between them. The work was written with vigorous impulse and the author has left, in his autobiography, the remark that none of his tragedies cost him so little labour. _Saul_ is in five acts and it contains 1567 lines--of that Italian _versi sciolti_ which inadequately corresponds to the blank verse of the English language. The scene is laid in the camp of Saul's army. Six persons are introduced, namely, Saul, Jonathan, David, Michel, Abner, and Achimelech. The time supposed to be occupied by the action--or rather, by the suffering--of the piece is a single day, the last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act second presents the distracted monarch, who knows that God has forsaken him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man, and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David--whom he at once loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence of Israel--so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease; the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent recurrence, before his mind's eye, of the shade of the dead prophet; and finally his suicidal death. It is, in form, a classical tragedy, massive, grand, and majestically simple; and it blazes from end to end with the fire of a sublime imagination.

Ardent lovers of Italian literature are fond of ranking _Saul_ with _Lear_. The claim is natural but it is not valid. In _Lear_--not to speak of its profound revelations of universal human nature and its vast philosophy of human life--there is a tremendous scope of action, through which mental condition and experience are dramatically revealed; and there is the deepest deep of pathos, because the highest height of afflicted goodness. In _Saul_ there is simply--upon a limited canvas, without adjuncts, without the suggestion of resources, without the relief of even mournful humour, and with a narrative rather than a dramatic background--the portraiture of a condition; and, because the man displayed is neither so noble nor so human, the pathos surcharging the work is neither so harrowing nor so tender. Yet the two works are akin in majesty of ideal, in the terrible topic of mental disease that shatters a king, and in the atmosphere of desolation that trails after them like a funeral pall; and it is not a wonder that Alfieri's Saul should be deemed the greatest tragedy ever originated in the Italian language. It attains a superb height, for it keeps an equal pace with the severe simplicity of the Bible narrative on which it is founded. It depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, a kind heart, and a royal and regally poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit world and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state. Awe and terror surround that august sufferer, and make him both holy and dreadful. In his person and his condition, as those are visible to the imaginative mind, he combined elements that irresistibly impress and thrill. He is of vast physical stature, that time has not bent, and of great beauty of face, that griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is a valiant and sanguinary warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss of misery--a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the Bible and of Alfieri's tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini embodied. It was a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor presented, and no one could look upon it without being awed and chastened.

Salvini's embodiment of King Lear was a remarkable manifestation of physical resources and of professional skill. The lofty stature, the ample and resonant voice, the copious animal excitement, the fluent elocution and the vigorous, picturesque, and often melodramatic movements, gestures, and poses of Salvini united to animate and embellish a personality such as would naturally absorb attention and diffuse excitement. Every artist, however, moves within certain specific and positive limitations--spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet, was unspiritual--giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative, obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the Moor that he interpreted were physical; the loftiest heights that he reached were terror and distracted grief; but he worked with a pictorial method and a magnetic vigour that enthralled the feelings even when they did not command the judgment.

His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations. During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric, disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and especially destitute of inherent personal fascination--of the suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin--but he has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent, overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself" were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia--as in "No more of that, I have noted it well"--and he gave, at the beginning, no intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first mad scene.

Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was crude. He put the king behind a table, in the first scene--which had the effect of preparation for a lecture; and it pleased him to speak the storm speech away back at the upper entrance, with his body almost wholly concealed behind painted crags. With all its moments of power and of tenderness the embodiment was neither royal, lovable, nor great. It might be a good Italian Lear: it was not the Lear of Shakespeare. Salvini was particularly out of the character in the curse scene and in the frantic parting from the two daughters, because there the quality of the man, behind the action, seemed especially common. The action, though, was theatrical and had its due effect.

XXIV.

HENRY IRVING AS EUGENE ARAM.

Henry Irving's impersonation of Eugene Aram--given in a vein that is distinctly unique--was one of strange and melancholy grace and also of weird poetical and pathetic power.

More than fifty years ago, just after Bulwer's novel on the subject of Eugene Aram was published, that character first came upon the stage, and its first introduction to the American theatre occurred at the Bowery, where it was represented by John R. Scott. Aram languished, however, as a dramatic person, and soon disappeared. He did not thrive in England, neither, till, in 1873, Henry Irving, who had achieved great success in _The Bells_, prompted W.G. Wills to effect his resuscitation in a new play, and acted him in a new manner. The part then found an actor who could play it,--investing psychological subtlety with tender human feeling and romantic grace, and making an imaginary experience of suffering vital and heartrending in its awful reality. The performance ranks with the best that Henry Irving has given--with _Mathias_, _Lesurques_, _Dubosc_, _Louis XI._, and _Hamlet_; those studies of the night-side of human nature in which his imagination and intellect and his sombre feeling have been revealed and best exemplified.

Eugene Aram was born at Ramsgill, in Nidderdale, Yorkshire, in 1704. His father, Peter Aram, was a man of good family but becoming reduced in circumstances he took service as a gardener on the estate of Sir Edward Blackett, of Newby Hall. In 1710 Peter Aram and his family were living at Bondgate, near Ripon, and there Eugene went to school and learned to read the New Testament. At a considerably later period he was instructed, during one month, by the Rev. Mr. Alcock, of Burndall. This was the extent of the tuition that he ever received from others. For the rest he was self-taught. He had a natural passion for knowledge and he displayed wonderful industry in its acquisition. When sixteen years old he knew something of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later he made himself acquainted with Chaldaic and Arabic. His occupation, up to this time, was that of assistant to his father, the gardener; but about 1720 he was employed in London as a clerk to a merchant, Mr. Christopher Blackett, a relative to his father's patron, Sir Edward. He did not remain there long. A serious illness prostrated him, and on recovering he returned to Nidderdale, with which romantic region his fate was to be forever associated. He now became a tutor, and not long after he was employed as such at a manor-house, near Ramsgill, called Gowthwaite Hall, a residence built early in the seventeenth century by Sir John Yorke, and long inhabited by his descendants. While living there he met and courted Anna Spance, the daughter of a farmer, at the lonely village of Lofthouse, and in 1731 he married her. The Middlesmoor registry contains the record of this marriage, and of the baptism and death of their first child. In 1734 Eugene Aram removed to Knaresborough, where he kept a school. He had, all this while, sedulously pursued his studies, and he now was a scholar of extraordinary acquirements, not only in the languages but in botany, heraldry, and many other branches of learning. His life seemed fair and his future bright: but a change was at hand. He had not resided long at Knaresborough before he became acquainted with three persons most unlike himself in every way. These men were Henry Terry, Richard Houseman, and Daniel Clarke. Houseman was a flax-dresser. Clarke was a travelling jeweller. All of them were intemperate; and it is supposed that the beginning of Eugene Aram's downfall was the appetite for drink. The confederacy that he formed with these men is not easily explicable, and probably it never has been rightly explained. The accepted statement is that it was a confederacy for fraud and theft. Clarke was reported to be the heir presumptive to a large fortune. He purchased goods, was punctual in his payments, and established his credit. He was supposed to be making purchases for a merchant in London. He dealt largely in gold and silver plate and in watches, and soon he made a liberal use of his credit to accumulate valuable objects. In 1744 he disappeared, and he never was seen or heard of again. His frauds became known, and the houses of Aram and Houseman, suspected as his associates, were searched, but nothing was found to implicate either of them.

Soon after this event Aram left Knaresborough--deserting his wife--and proceeded to London, where for two years he had employment as a teacher of Latin. He was subsequently an usher at the boarding school of the Rev. Anthony Hinton, at Hayes, in Middlesex, and there it was observed that he displayed an extraordinary and scrupulous tenderness and solicitude as to the life and safety of even worms and insects--which he would remove from the garden walks and put into places of security. At a later period he found employment as a transcriber of acts of Parliament, for registration in chancery. Still later he became an usher at the Free School of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, among other labours, he undertook to make a comparative lexicon, and with this purpose collated over 3000 words in English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic. He had ample opportunity to leave England but he never did so. At length, in 1759, a labourer who was digging for limestone, at a place known as St. Robert's Cave, Thistle Hill, near Knaresborough, came upon a human skeleton, bent double and buried in the earth. Suspicion was aroused. These bones, it was surmised, might be those of Daniel Clarke. His mysterious disappearance and his associates were remembered. The authorities sent forth and arrested Terry, Houseman, and Eugene Aram, and those persons were brought to their trial at York. A bold front would have saved them, for the evidence against them was weak. Aram stood firm, but Houseman quailed, and presently he turned "state's evidence" and denounced Aram as the murderer of Clarke. The accused scholar spoke in his own defence, and with astonishing skill, but he failed to defeat the direct and decisive evidence of his accomplice. Houseman declared that on the day of the murder Clarke, Aram, and himself were in company, and were occupied in disposing of the property which they had obtained; that Aram proposed to walk in the fields, and that they proceeded, thereupon, at nightfall, to the vicinity of St. Robert's Cave. Clarke and Aram, he said, went over the hedge and advanced toward the cave, and Aram struck Clarke several times upon the breast and head, and so killed him. It was a dark night, and in the middle of winter, but the moon was shining through drifting clouds, and Houseman said he could see the movement of Aram's hand but not the weapon that it held. He was about twelve yards from the spot of the murder. He testified that the body of Clarke was buried in the cave. The presiding justice charged against the prisoner and Eugene Aram was convicted and condemned. He subsequently, it is said, confessed the crime, alleging to the clergyman by whom he was attended that his wife had been led into an intrigue by Clarke, and that this was the cause of the murder. Here, doubtless, is the indication of the true nature of this tragedy. Aram, prior to his execution, was confined in York Castle, where he wrote a poem of considerable length and some merit, and also several shorter pieces of verse. On the morning of his execution it was found that he had opened a vein in his arm, with the intent to bleed to death, but the wound was staunched, and he was taken to Knaresborough and there hanged, and afterward his body was hung in chains in Knaresborough Forest. His death occurred on August 13, 1759, in the fifty-fifth year of his age. On the night before his execution he wrote a rhythmical apostrophe to death:--

"Come, pleasing rest! eternal slumber fall!
Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all!
Calm and composed my soul her journey takes;
No guilt that troubles and no heart that aches."

Such is the story of Eugene Aram--a story that has furnished the basis of various fictions, notably of Bulwer's famous novel, and which inspired one of the best of the beautiful poems of Thomas Hood. Wills gathered hints from it, here and there, in the making of his play; but he boldly departed from its more hideous and repulsive incidents and from the theory of the main character that might perhaps be justified by its drift. In the construction of the piece Henry Irving made many material suggestions. The treatment of the character of Aram was devised by him, and the management of the close of the second act denotes his felicity of invention.

The play opens in the rose-garden of a rural rectory in the sweet, green valley of the shining Nidd. The time is twilight; the season summer; and here, in a haven of peace and love, the repentant murderer has found a refuge. Many years have passed since the commission of his crime, and all those years he has lived a good life, devoted to study, instruction, and works of benevolence. He has been a teacher of the young, a helper of the poor, and he has gained respect, affection, and honourable repute. He is safe in the security of silence and in the calm self-poise of his adamantine will. His awful secret sleeps in his bosom and is at rest forever. He has suffered much and he still suffers; yet, lulled into a false security by the uneventful lapse of years and by that drifting, desolate, apathetic recklessness which is sequent on the subsiding storm of passionate sorrow, he has allowed himself to accept a woman's love and to love her in return, and half to believe that his long misery has expiated his sin and that even for him there may be a little happiness yet possible on earth. Eugene Aram, the village school-master, and Ruth Meadows, the vicar's daughter, are betrothed lovers; and now, on the eve of their wedding morning, they stand together among the roses, while the sun is going down and the sweet summer wind plays softly in the leaves, and from the little gray church close by a solemn strain of music--the vesper hymn--floats out upon the stillness of the darkening day. The woman is all happiness, confidence, and hope; the man, seared and blighted by conscious sin and subdued by long years of patient submission to the sense of his own unworthiness, is all gentleness, solicitude, reverence, and sorrow. At this supreme moment, when now it seems that everything is surely well, the one man in the world who knows Eugene Aram's secret has become, by seeming chance, a guest in the vicarage; and even while Ruth places her hand upon her lover's heart and softly whispers, "If guilt were there, it still should be my pillow," the shadow of the gathering night that darkens around them is deepened by the blacker shadow of impending doom. The first act of the play is simply a picture. It involves no action. It only introduces the several persons who are implicated in the experience to be displayed, denotes their relationship to one another, and reveals a condition of feeling and circumstance which is alike romantic, pathetic, and perilous, and which is soon to be shattered by the disclosure of a fatal secret. The act is a preparation for a catastrophe.

In the second act the opposed characters clash: the movement begins, and the catastrophe is precipitated. The story opens at nightfall, proceeds the same evening, and ends at the dawn of the ensuing day. The scene of act second is a room in the vicarage. Aram and Parson Meadows are playing chess, and Ruth is hovering about them and roguishly impeding their play. The purpose accomplished here is the exhibition of domestic comfort and content, and this is further emphasised by Ruth's recital of a written tribute that Aram's pupils have sent to him, on the eve of his marriage. Wounded by this praise the conscience-stricken wretch breaks off abruptly from his pastime and rushes from the room--an act of desperate grief which is attributed to his modesty. The parson soon follows, and Ruth is left alone. Houseman, their casual guest, having accepted the vicar's hospitable offer of a shelter for the night, has now a talk with Ruth, and he is startled to hear the name of Eugene Aram, and thus to know that he has found the man whose fatal secret he possesses, and upon whose assumed dread of exposure his cupidity now purposes to feed. In a coarsely jocular way this brutish creature provokes the indignant resentment of Ruth, by insinuations as to her betrothed lover's past life; and when, a little later, Ruth and Aram again meet, she wooingly begs him to tell her of any secret trouble that may be weighing upon his mind. At this moment Houseman comes upon them, and utters Aram's name. From that point to the end of the act there is a sustained and sinewy exposition, strong in spirit and thrilling in suspense,--of keen intellect and resolute will standing at bay and making their last battle for life, against the overwhelming odds of heaven's appointed doom. Aram defies Houseman and is denounced by him; but the ready adroitness and iron composure of the suffering wretch still give him supremacy over his foe--till, suddenly, the discovery is announced of the bones of Daniel Clarke in St. Robert's Cave, and the vicar commands Aram and Houseman to join him in their inspection. Here the murderer suffers a collapse. There has been a greater strain than even he can bear; and, left alone upon the scene, he stands petrified with horror, seeming, in an ecstasy of nameless fear, to look upon the spectre of his victim. Henry Irving's management of the apparition effect was such as is possible only to a man of genius, and such as words may record but never can describe.

The third act passes in the churchyard. Aram has fled from the sight of the skeleton, and has fallen among the graves. It is almost morning. The ghastly place is silent and dark. The spirit of the murderer is broken, and his enfeebled body, long since undermined by the grief of remorse and now chilled by the night dews, is in the throes of death. The incidents of the closing scene are simple, but they are heart-breaking in their pathos and awful in their desolation. The fugitive Houseman finds Aram here, and spurns him as a whimpering lunatic. Then, in this midnight hour and this appalling place, alone in the presence of God, the murderer lifts his hands toward heaven, confesses his crime, and falls at the foot of the cross. Here Ruth finds him, and to her, with dying lips, he tells the story of the murder and of all that he has since endured. And just as his voice falters into silence and his heart ceases to beat, the diamond light of morning gleams in the eastern sky and the glad music of an anthem floats softly from the neighbouring church. Upon that beautifully significant picture the final curtain fell.

Wills's literary framework for the display of character and experience is scarcely to be considered a perfect play. It begins by assuming on the part of its auditor a knowledge of the mystery upon which it is based. Such a knowledge the auditor ought certainly to have, but in presence of an exact drama he derives it from what he sees and not from remembrance of what he has read. The piece is, perhaps, somewhat irrational in making Aram a resident, under his own name, of the actual neighbourhood of his crime. It lowers the assumed nobility of his character, furthermore, by making this remorseful and constantly apprehensive murderer willing to yoke a sweet, innocent, and idolised woman to misery and shame by making her his wife. And it mars its most pathetic scene--the awful scene of the midnight confession in the churchyard--by making Eugene Aram declare, to the woman of his love, the one human being who comforts and sustains him on the brink of eternity, that he has loved another woman for whose sake he did the murder. Since the whole story was to be treated in a fanciful manner, a still wider license in the play of fancy would, perhaps, have had a more entirely gracious and satisfying effect. The language is partly blank verse and partly prose; and, while its tissue is rightly and skilfully diversified by judicious allowance for the effect of each character upon the garment of individual diction, and while its strain, here and there, rises to eloquence of feeling and beauty of imagery, there is a certain lack of firmness in its verbal fibre. The confession speech that has to be spoken by Aram comprises upward of ninety lines--and that is a severe and perilous strain upon an actor's power of holding the public interest. The beauties of the play, however, are many and strong. Its crowning excellence is that it gives dramatic permanence to a strangely interesting character.

The knowledge of human nature that Henry Irving revealed in this part and the manner in which he revealed it were nothing less than wonderful. The moment he walked upon the scene you saw the blighted figure of a man who has endured, and is enduring, spiritual torment. The whole personality was suffused with a mournful strangeness. The man was isolated and alone. It was a purely ideal view of the character that the actor denoted; for he made Eugene Aram a noble, tender, gentle person, whom ungovernable passion, under circumstances of overwhelming provocation, had once impelled to an act of half-justifiable homicide, and who had for years been slowly dying with remorse. He touched no chord of terror, but only the chord of pity. Like his portrayal of Mathias, the picture showed the reactionary effect of hidden sin in the human soul; but the personality of the sufferer was entirely different. Each of those men has had experience of crime and of resultant misery, but no two embodiments could possibly be more dissimilar, alike in spiritual quality and in circumstances. Mathias is dominated by paternal love and characterised by a half-defiant, ever-vigilant, and often self-approbative pride of intellect, in being able to guard and keep a terrible and dangerous secret. Eugene Aram is dominated by a saint-like tenderness toward a sweet woman who loves him, and characterised by a profound, fitful melancholy, now humble and submissive, now actively apprehensive and almost frenzied. Only once does he stand at bay and front his destiny with a defiance of desperate will; and even then it is for the woman's sake rather than for his own. Henry Irving's acting made clear and beautiful that condition of temperament. A noble and affectionate nature, shipwrecked, going to pieces, doomed, but making one last tremendous though futile effort to avert the final and inevitable ruin--this ideal was made actual in his performance. The intellectual or spiritual value of such a presentment must depend upon the auditor's capacity to absorb from a tragedy its lessons of insight into the relations of the human soul to the moral government of the world. Many spectators would find it merely morbid and gloomy; others would find it superlatively illuminative and eloquent. Its artistic value the actor himself made evident to every comprehension. There is a moment of the performance when the originally massive and passionate character of Eugene Aram is suddenly asserted above his meekness, contrition, and sorrow; when, at the sound of his enemy's voice, he first becomes petrified with the sense of peril, and then calmly gathers all his powers to meet and conquer the danger. The splendid concentration, the perfect poise, the sustained intensity, the copious and amazing variety and force of emotion, and the positive, unerring, and brilliant art with which Henry Irving met that emergency and displayed that frightful and piteous aspect of assailed humanity, desperate and fighting for life, made up such an image of genius as seldom is seen and never will be forgotten. Rapid transition has ever been one of the commonest and most effective expedients used in histrionic art. This, on the contrary, was an example of sustained, prolonged, cumulative, artistic expression of the most harrowing and awful emotions with which the human soul can be convulsed; and it was a wonder of consummate acting. The same thoroughness of identification and the same astonishing adequacy of feeling pervaded the scene in the churchyard. At first, in the dusky starlight, only a shapeless figure, covered with a black cloak, was seen among the gravestones, crouched upon a tomb; but the man that rose, as if out of the grave, pallid, emaciated, ghastly, the spectre of himself, was the authentic image of majestic despair, not less sublime than pitiable, and fraught with a power that happiness could never attain. Not in our time upon the stage has such a lesson been taught, with such overwhelming pathos, of the utter helplessness of even the strongest human will, when once the soul has been vitiated by sin and the eternal law of right defied by mortal passion. In the supplication to his astonished accomplice the actor seemed like one transfigured, and there the haunted effect was extremely awful.

XXV.

CHARLES FISHER.

In old times Charles Fisher often figured in the old comedies, and he was one of the last of the thin and rapidly lessening group of actors capable of presenting those pieces--wherein, although the substance be human nature, the manner is that of elaborate and diversified artifice. When he played Lieutenant Worthington, in _The Poor Gentleman_, he was a gentleman indeed--refined, delicate, sensitive, simply courageous, sustained by native integrity, and impressive with a dignity of manner that reflected the essential nobility of his mind; so that when he mistook Sir Robert Bramble for a bailiff, and roused that benevolent baronet's astonishment and rage, he brought forth all the comic humour of a delightful situation with the greatest ease and nature. He played Littleton Coke, Sir Harcourt Courtly, old Laroque--in which he gave a wonderful picture of the working of remorse in the frail and failing brain of age--and Nicholas Rue, in _Secrets worth Knowing_, a sinister and thrilling embodiment of avarice and dotage. He played Dr. Bland, the elegant medical cynic of _Nos Intimes_; De la Tour, the formidable, jealous husband of Henriette, in _Le Patte de Mouche_; Horace, in _The Country Squire_; Goldfinch, in which he was airy, sagacious, dashing, and superb, in _The Road to Ruin_; and Captain Cozzens, the nonchalant rascal of _The Knights of the Round Table_, which he embodied in a style of easy magnificence, gay, gallant, courageous, alert, imperturbable, and immensely comic. He was the original Matthew Leigh in Lester Wallack's romantic play of _Rosedale_ (1863). He acted Joseph Surface in the days when Lester Wallack used to play Charles, and he always held his own in that superior part. He was equally fine in Sir Peter and Sir Oliver. When the good old play of _The Wife's Secret_ was revived in New York, in 1864, he gave a dignified and impetuous performance of Sir Walter Amyott. I remember him in those parts, with equal wonder at his comprehensive variety of talent and admiration for his always adequate skill. I saw him as the volatile Ferment, in _The School of Reform_, and nothing could be more comic than his unwitting abuse of General Tarragon, in that blustering officer's presence, or his equally ludicrous scene of cross purposes with Bob Tyke. He was a perfect type, as Don Manuel Velasco, in _The Compact_, of the gallant, stately Spanish aristocrat. He excelled competition when, in a company that included George Holland, W. Holston, A.W. Young, Mark Smith, Frederick C.P. Robinson, and John Gilbert, he enacted the convict in _Never Too Late to Mend_. He was equally at home whether as the King in _Don Cæsar de Bazan_ or as Tom Stylus the literary hack, in _Society_. He passed easily from the correct and sentimental Sir Thomas Clifford, of _The Hunchback_, to the frivolous Mr. Willowear, of _To Marry or Not to Marry_. No one could better express than he did, when playing Wellborn, both pride of birth and pride of character. One of his most characteristic works was Hyssop, in _The Rent Day_. His scope and the rich resources of his experience are denoted in those citations. It is no common artist who can create and sustain a perfect illusion, and please an audience equally well, whether in such a part as Gilbert Featherstone, the villain, in _Lost in London_, or old Baptista, in _The Taming of the Shrew_. The playgoer who never saw Charles Fisher as Triplet can scarcely claim that he ever saw the part at all. The quaint figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack--who that ever laughed and wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and hilarity," to write his comedy, can ever forget those details of a true and touching embodiment? His fine skill in playing the violin was touchingly displayed in that part, and gave it an additional tone of reality. I once saw him acting Mercutio, and very admirable he was in the guise of that noble, brave, frolicsome, impetuous young gentleman. The intense vitality, the glancing glee, the intrepid spirit--all were preserved; and the brilliant text was spoken with faultless fluency. It is difficult to realise that the same actor who set before us that perfect image of comic perplexity, the bland and benevolent Dean, in _Dandy Dick_, could ever have been the bantering companion of Romeo and truculent adversary of fiery Tybalt. Yet this contrast but faintly indicates the versatile character of his mind. Fisher was upon the American stage for thirty-eight years, from August 30, 1852, when he came forth at Burton's theatre as Ferment. Later he went to Wallack's, and in 1872 he joined Daly's company, in which he remained till 1890. It may be conjectured that in some respects he resembled that fine comedian Thomas Dogget, to whom Sir Godfrey Kneller, the painter, said, "I can only copy Nature from the originals before me, while you vary them at pleasure and yet preserve the likeness." Like Dogget he played, in a vein of rich, hearty, jocose humour, and with great breadth of effect and excellent colour, the sailor Ben, in _Love for Love_. The resemblance was in mental characteristics, not physique--for Dogget was a slight and sprightly man, whereas Fisher could represent majesty as well as frolic. After he went to Daly's theatre he manifested a surprising range of faculty. He first appeared there on October 28, 1872, as Mr. Dornton, in _The Road to Ruin_, and on November 19, following, he acted Falstaff for the first time. He presented there the other Shakespearean parts of Leonatus, Armado, and Malvolio--the last of these being a model of fidelity to the poet, and now a classic in reputation. He also assumed Adam and Jaques. He presented the living image of Shakespeare himself, in _Yorick_, and his large, broad, stately style gave weight to Don Manuel, in _She Would and She Wouldn't_; to that apt type of the refined British aristocrat, Sir Geoffrey Champneys, in _Our Boys_; and to many a noble father or benevolent uncle of the adapted French society drama. Just as Dogget was supreme in such parts as Fondlewife, so was Fisher superb in the uxorious husband whom the demure child-wife bamboozles, in the comedies of Molière. No man has ever better depicted than he did a sweet nature shocked by calamity and bowed down with grief, or, as in Joe Chirrup, in _Elfie_, manliness chastened by affliction and ennobled by true love: yet his impersonation of Fagin was only second to that of J.W. Wallack, Jr.; his Moody, in _The Country Girl_, was almost tragic in its grim and grizzled wretchedness and snarling wrath; and I have seen him assume to perfection the gaunt figure and crazy mood of Noah Learoyd, in _The Long Strike_, and make that personality a terrible embodiment of menace. From the time he first acted the comic Major Vavasour, in _Henry Dunbar_, no actor of equal quaintness has trod our stage. He died on June 11, 1891, and was buried at Woodlawn.

XXVI.

MRS. G.H. GILBERT.

Students of the English stage find in books on that subject abundant information about the tragedy queens of the early drama, and much likewise, though naturally somewhat less (because comedy is more difficult to discuss than tragedy), about the comedy queens. Mrs. Cibber still discomfits the melting Mrs. Porter by a tenderness even greater than the best of Belvideras could dispense. Mrs. Bracegirdle and Mrs. Oldfield still stand confronted on the historic page, and still their battle continues year after year. All readers know the sleepy voice and horrid sigh of Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth's awful scene of haunted somnambulism; the unexampled and unexcelled grandeur of Mrs. Yates in Medea; the infinite pathos of Mrs. Dancer (she that became in succession Mrs. Spranger Barry and Mrs. Crawford) and her memorable scream, as Lady Randolph, at "Was he alive?"; the comparative discomfiture of both those ladies by Mrs. Siddons, with her wonderful, wailing cry, as Isabella, "O, my Biron, my Biron," her overwhelming Lady Macbeth and her imperial Queen Katharine. The brilliant story of Peg Woffington and the sad fate of Mrs. Robinson, the triumphant career of Mrs. Abington and the melancholy collapse of Mrs. Jordan--all those things, and many more, are duly set down in the chronicles. But the books are comparatively silent about the Old Women of the stage--an artistic line no less delightful than useful, of which Mrs. G.H. Gilbert is a sterling and brilliant representative. Mrs. Jefferson, the great-grandmother of the comedian Joseph Jefferson, who died of laughter, on the stage (1766-68), might fitly be mentioned as the dramatic ancestor of such actresses as Mrs. Gilbert. She was a woman of great loveliness of character and of great talent for the portrayal of "old women," and likewise of certain "old men" in comedy. "She had," says Tate Wilkinson, "one of the best dispositions that ever harboured in a human breast"; and he adds that "she was one of the most elegant women ever beheld." Mrs. Gilbert has always suggested that image of grace, goodness, and piquant ability. Mrs. Vernon was the best in this line until Mrs. Gilbert came; and the period which has seen Mrs. Judah, Mrs. Vincent, Mrs. Germon, Mary Carr, Mrs. Chippendale, Mrs. Stirling, Mrs. Billington, Mrs. Drew, Mrs. Phillips, and Madam Ponisi, has seen no superior to Mrs. Gilbert in her special walk. She was in youth a beautiful dancer, and all her motions have spontaneous ease and grace. She can assume the fine lady, without for an instant suggesting the parvenu. She is equally good, whether as the formal and severe matron of starched domestic life, or the genial dame of the pantry. She could play Temperance in _The Country Squire_, and equally she could play Mrs. Jellaby. All varieties of the eccentricity of elderly women, whether serious or comic, are easily within her grasp. Betsy Trotwood, embodied by her, becomes a living reality; while on the other hand she suffused with a sinister horror her stealthy, gliding, uncanny personation of the dumb, half-insane Hester Dethridge. That was the first great success that Mrs. Gilbert gained, under Augustin Daly's management. She has been associated with Daly's company since his opening night as a manager, August 16, 1869, when, at the Fifth Avenue theatre, then in Twenty-fourth Street, she took part in Robertson's comedy of _Play_. The first time I ever saw her she was acting the Marquise de St. Maur, in _Caste_, on the night of its first production in America, August 5, 1867, at the Broadway theatre, the house near the southwest corner of Broadway and Broome Street, that had been Wallack's but now was managed by Barney Williams. The assumption of that character, perfect in every particular, was instinct with pure aristocracy; but while brilliant with serious ability it gave not the least hint of those rich resources of humour that since have diffused so much innocent pleasure. Most of her successes have been gained as the formidable lady who typifies in comedy the domestic proprieties and the Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun of _A Night Off_. From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, from Shakespeare down, has found it so difficult to treat. This actress has never failed to impress the spectator by her clear-cut, brilliant identification with every type of character that she has assumed; and, back of this, she has denoted a kind heart and a sweet and gentle yet never insipid temperament--the condition of goodness, sympathy, graciousness, and cheer that is the flower of a fine nature and a good life. Scenes in which Mrs. Gilbert and Charles Fisher or James Lewis have participated, as old married people, on Daly's stage, will long be remembered for their intrinsic beauty--suggestive of the touching lines:

"And when with envy Time, transported,
Shall think to rob us of our joys,
You'll in your girls again be courted,
And I'll go wooing with my boys."

XXVII.

JAMES LEWIS.

A prominent representative type of character is "the humorous man," and that is Shakespeare's phrase to describe him. Wit is a faculty; humour an attribute. Joseph Addison, Laurence Sterne, Washington Irving--whatever else they might have been they were humourists. Sir Roger de Coverley, Tristram Shandy, Uncle Toby, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Ichabod Crane--these and other creations of their genius stand forth upon their pages to exemplify that aspect of their minds. But the humourist of the pen may, personally, be no humourist at all. Addison's character was austere. Irving, though sometimes gently playful, was essentially grave and decorous.