Shadows of the Stage

Shadows of the Stage.

by William Winter.

PREFACE.

_The papers contained in this volume, chosen out of hundreds that the author has written on dramatic subjects, are a.s.sembled with the hope that they may be accepted, in their present form, as a part of the permanent record of our theatrical times. For at least thirty years it has been a considerable part of the constant occupation of the author to observe and to record the life of the contemporary stage. Since 1860 he has written intermittently in various periodicals, and since the summer of 1865 he has written continuously in the New York Tribune, upon actors and their art; and in that way he has acc.u.mulated a great ma.s.s of historical commentary upon the drama. In preparing this book he has been permitted to draw from his contributions to the Tribune, and also from his writings in Harper"s Magazine and Weekly, in the London Theatre, and in Augustin Daly"s Portfolio of Players. The choice of these papers has been determined partly by consideration of s.p.a.ce and partly with the design of supplementing the author"s earlier dramatic books, namely: Edwin Booth in Twelve Dramatic Characters; The Jeffersons; Henry Irving; The Stage Life of Mary Anderson; Brief Chronicles, containing eighty-six dramatic biographies; In Memory of McCullough; The Life of John Gilbert; The Life and Works of John Brougham; The Press and the Stage; The Actor and Other Speeches; and A Daughter of Comedy, being the life of Ada Rehan. The impulse of all those writings, and of the present volume, is commemorative. Let us save what we can._

_"Sed omnes una manet nox, Et calcanda semel via leti."_

W.W.

APRIL 18, 1892.

_"--It so fell out that certain players We o"er-raught on the way: of these we told him; And there did seem in him a kind of joy To hear of it."_

HAMLET.

_"Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world--though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst--the cant of criticism is the most tormenting. I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man who will give up the reins of his imagination into his author"s hands,--be pleased he knows not why and cares not wherefore."_

TRISTRAM SHANDY.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.

I.

THE GOOD OLD TIMES.

It is recorded of John Lowin, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare and a.s.sociated with several of Shakespeare"s greater characters (his range was so wide, indeed, that it included Falstaff, Henry the Eighth, and Hamlet), that, having survived the halcyon days of "Eliza and our James"

and lingered into the drab and russet period of the Puritans, when all the theatres in the British islands were suppressed, he became poor and presently kept a tavern, at Brentford, called The Three Pigeons. Lowin was born in 1576 and he died in 1654--his grave being in London, in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields--so that, obviously, he was one of the veterans of the stage. He was in his seventy-eighth year when he pa.s.sed away--wherefore in his last days he must have been "a mine of memories." He could talk of the stirring times of Leicester, Drake, Ess.e.x, and Raleigh. He could remember, as an event of his boyhood, the execution of Queen Mary Stuart, and possibly he could describe, as an eye-witness, the splendid funeral procession of Sir Philip Sidney. He could recall the death of Queen Elizabeth; the advent of Scottish James; the ruffling, brilliant, dissolute, audacious Duke of Buckingham; the impeachment and disgrace of Francis Bacon; the production of the great plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; the meetings of the wits and poets at the Apollo and the Mermaid. He might have personally known Robert Herrick--that loveliest of the wild song-birds of that golden age. He might have been present at the burial of Edmund Spenser, in Westminster Abbey--when the poet brothers of the author of _The Faerie Queene_ cast into his grave their ma.n.u.script elegies and the pens with which those laments had been written. He had acted Hamlet,--perhaps in the author"s presence. He had seen the burning of the old Globe Theatre. He had been, in the early days of Charles the First, the chief and distinguished Falstaff of the time. He had lived under the rule of three successive princes; had deplored the sanguinary fate of the martyr-king (for the actors were almost always royalists); had seen the rise of the Parliament and the downfall of the theatre; and now, under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, he had become the keeper of an humble wayside inn. It is easy to fancy the old actor sitting in his chair of state, the monarch of his tap-room, with a flagon of beer, and a church-warden pipe of tobacco, and holding forth, to a select circle of cronies, upon the vanished glories of the Elizabethan stage--upon the days when there were persons in existence really worthy to be called actors. He could talk of Richard Burbage, the first Romeo; of Armin, famous in Shakespeare"s clowns and fools; of Heminge and Condell, who edited the First Folio of Shakespeare, which possibly he himself purchased, fresh from the press; of Joseph Taylor, whom it is said Shakespeare personally instructed how to play Hamlet, and the recollection of whose performance enabled Sir William Davenant to impart to Betterton the example and tradition established by the author--a model that has lasted to the present day; of Kempe, the original Dogberry, and of the exuberant, merry Richard Tarleton, after whom that comic genius had fashioned his artistic method; of Alleyne, who kept the bear-garden, and who founded the College and Home at Dulwich--where they still flourish; of Gabriel Spencer, and his duel with Ben Jonson, wherein he lost his life at the hands of that burly antagonist; of Marlowe "of the mighty line," and his awful and lamentable death--stabbed at Deptford by a drunken drawer in a tavern brawl. Very rich and fine, there can be no doubt, were that veteran actor"s remembrances of "the good old times," and most explicit and downright, it may surely be believed, was his opinion, freely communicated to the gossips of The Three Pigeons, that--in the felicitous satirical phrase of Joseph Jefferson--all the good actors are dead.

It was ever thus. Each successive epoch of theatrical history presents the same picturesque image of storied regret--memory incarnated in the veteran, ruefully vaunting the vanished glories of the past. There has always been a time when the stage was finer than it is now. Cibber and Macklin, surviving in the best days of Garrick, Peg Woffington, and Kitty Clive, were always praising the better days of Wilks, Betterton, and Elizabeth Barry. Aged play-goers of the period of Edmund Kean and John Philip Kemble were firmly persuaded that the drama had been buried, never to rise again, with the dust of Garrick and Henderson, beneath the pavement of Westminster Abbey. Less than fifty years ago an American historian of the stage (James Rees, 1845) described it as a wreck, overwhelmed with "gloom and eternal night," above which the genius of the drama was mournfully presiding, in the likeness of an owl. The New York veteran of to-day, although his sad gaze may not penetrate backward quite to the effulgent splendours of the old Park, will sigh for Burton"s and the Olympic, and the luminous period of Mrs. Richardson, Mary Taylor, and Tom Hamblin. The Philadelphia veteran gazes back to the golden era of the old Chestnut Street theatre, the epoch of tie-wigs and shoe-buckles, the ill.u.s.trious times of Wood and Warren, when Fennell, Cooke, Cooper, Wallack, and J.B. Booth were shining names in tragedy, and Jefferson and William Twaits were great comedians, and the beautiful Anne Brunton was the queen of the stage. The Boston veteran speaks proudly of the old Federal and the old Tremont, of Mary Duff, Julia Pelby, Charles Eaton, and Clara Fisher, and is even beginning to gild with reminiscent splendour the first days of the Boston Theatre, when Thomas Barry was manager and Julia Bennett Barrow and Mrs. John Wood contended for the public favour. In a word, the age that has seen Rachel, Seebach, Ristori, Charlotte Cushman, and Adelaide Neilson, the age that sees Ellen Terry, Mary Anderson, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Henry Irving, Salvini, Coquelin, Lawrence Barrett, John Gilbert, John S.

Clarke, Ada Rehan, James Lewis, Clara Morris, and Richard Mansfield, is a comparatively sterile period--"Too long shut in strait and few, thinly dieted on dew"--which ought to have felt the spell of Cooper and Mary Buff, and known what acting was when Cooke"s long forefinger pointed the way, and Dunlap bore the banner, and pretty Mrs. Marshall bewitched the father of his country, and Dowton raised the laugh, and lovely Mrs.

Barrett melted the heart, and the roses were "bright by the calm Bendemeer." The present writer, who began theatre-going in earnest over thirty years ago, finds himself full often musing over a dramatic time that still seems brighter than this--when he could exult in the fairy splendour and comic humour of _Aladdin_ and weep over the sorrows of _The Drunkard_, when he was thrilled and frightened by J.B. Booth in _The Apostate_, and could find an ecstasy of pleasure in the loves of Alonzo and Cora and the sublime self-sacrifice of Rolla. Thoughts of such actors as Henry Wallack, George Jordan, John Brougham, John E.

Owens, Mary Carr, Mrs. Barrow, and Charlotte Thompson, together in the same theatre, are thoughts of brilliant people and of more than commonly happy displays of talent and beauty. The figures that used to be seen on Wallack"s stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John Brougham"s Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light.

Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so n.o.ble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of colour or the hyacinth of grace, and as delicate and refined as an exquisite bit of old china--those actors made a group, the like of which it would be hard to find now. Shall we ever see again such an Oth.e.l.lo as Edwin Forrest, or such a Lord Duberly and Cap"n Cuttle as Burton, or such a Dazzle as John Brougham, or such an Affable Hawk as Charles Mathews? Certainly there was a superiority of manner, a tinge of intellectual character, a tone of grace and romance about the old actors, such as is not common in the present; and, making all needful allowance for the illusive glamour that memory casts over the distant and the dim, it yet remains true that the veterans of our day have a certain measure of right upon their side of the question.

In the earlier periods of our theatrical history the strength of the stage was concentrated in a few theatres. The old Park, for example, was called simply The Theatre, and when the New York playgoer spoke of going to the play he meant that he was going there. One theatre, or perhaps two, might flourish, in a considerable town, during a part of the year, but the field was limited, and therefore the actors were brought together in two or three groups. The star system, at least till the time of Cooper, seems to have been innocuous. Garrick"s prodigious success in London, more than a hundred years ago, had enabled him to engross the control of the stage in that centre, where he was but little opposed, and practically to exile many players of the first ability, whose l.u.s.tre he dimmed or whose services he did not require; and those players dispersed themselves to distant places--to York, Dublin, Edinburgh, etc.--or crossed the sea to America. With that beginning the way was opened for the growth of superb stock-companies, in the early days of the American theatre. The English, next to the Italians, were the first among modern peoples to create a dramatic literature and to establish the acted drama, and they have always led in this field--antedating, historically, and surpa.s.sing in essential things the French stage which nowadays it is fashionable to extol. English influence, at all times stern and exacting, stamped the character of our early theatre. The tone of society, alike in the mother country, in the colonies, and in the first years of our Republic, was, as to these matters, formal and severe. Success upon the stage was exceedingly difficult to obtain, and it could not be obtained without substantial merit. The youths who sought it were often persons of liberal education. In Philadelphia, New York, and Boston the stock-companies were composed of select and thoroughly trained actors, many of whom were well-grounded cla.s.sical scholars. Furthermore, the epoch was one of far greater leisure and repose than are possible now--- when the civilised world is at the summit of sixty years of scientific development such as it had not experienced in all its recorded centuries of previous progress.

Naturally enough the dramatic art of our ancestors was marked by scholar-like and thorough elaboration, mellow richness of colour, absolute simplicity of character, and great solidity of merit. Such actors as Wignell, Hodgkinson, Jefferson, Francis, and Blissett offered no work that was not perfect of its kind. The tradition had been established and accepted, and it was transmitted and preserved.

Everything was concentrated, and the public grew to be entirely familiar with it. Men, accordingly, who obtained their ideas of acting at a time when they were under influences surviving from those ancient days are confused, bewildered, and distressed by much that is offered in the theatres now. I have listened to the talk of an aged American acquaintance (Thurlow Weed), who had seen and known Edmund Kean, and who said that all modern tragedians were insignificant in comparison with him. I have listened to the talk of an aged English acquaintance (Fladgate), who had seen and known John Philip Kemble, and who said that his equal has never since been revealed. The present day knows what the old school was,[1] when it sees William Warren, Joseph Jefferson, Charles Fisher, Mrs. John Drew, John Gilbert, J.H. Stoddart, Mrs. G.H.

Gilbert, William Davidge, and Lester Wallack--the results and the remains of it. The old touch survives in them and is under their control, and no one, seeing their ripe and finished art, can feel surprise that the veteran moralist should be wedded to his idols of the past, and should often be heard sadly to declare that all the good actors--except these--are dead. He forgets that scores of theatres now exist where once there were but two or three; that the population of the United States has been increased by about fifty millions within ninety years; that the field has been enormously broadened; that the character of, the audience has become one of illimitable diversity; that the prodigious growth of the star-system, together with all sorts of experimental catch-penny theatrical management, is one of the inevitable necessities of the changed condition of civilisation; that the feverish tone of this great struggling and seething ma.s.s of humanity is necessarily reflected in the state of the theatre; and that the forces of the stage have become very widely diffused. Such a moralist would necessarily be shocked by the changes that have come upon our theatre within even the last twenty-five years--by the advent of "the sensation drama," invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its mult.i.tudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ever existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what was formerly concentrated is now scattered.

The stage is keeping step with the progress of human thought in every direction, and it will continue to advance. Evil influences impressed upon it there certainly are, in liberal abundance--not the least of these being that of the speculative shop-keeper, whose nature it is to seize any means of turning a penny, and who deals in dramatic art precisely as he would deal in groceries: but when we speak of "our stage" we do not mean an aggregation of shows or of the schemes of showmen. The stage is an inst.i.tution that has grown out of a necessity in human nature. It was as inevitable that man should evolve the theatre as it was that he should evolve the church, the judiciary tribunal, the parliament, or any other essential component of the State. Almost all human beings possess the dramatic perception; a few possess the dramatic faculty. These few are born for the stage, and each and every generation contributes its number to the service of this art. The problem is one of selection and embarkation. Of the true actor it may be said, as Ben Jonson says of the true poet, that he is made as well as born. The finest natural faculties have never yet been known to avail without training and culture. But this is a problem which, in a great measure, takes care of itself and in time works out and submits its own solution.

The anomaly, every day presented, of the young person who, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, and having nothing to communicate except the desire of communication, nevertheless rushes upon the stage, is felt to be absurd. Where the faculty as well as the instinct exists, however, impulse soon recognises the curb of common sense, and the aspirant finds his level. In this way the dramatic profession is recruited. In this way the several types of dramatic artist--each type being distinct and each being expressive of a sequence from mental and spiritual ancestry--are maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It is made up, like every other group, of the old, the middle-aged, and the young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and to reproduce, with the delicate exaggeration essential to dramatic art, every species of person; in order that all human life--whether of the street, the dwelling, the court, the camp, man in his common joys and sorrows, his vices, crimes, miseries, his loftiest aspirations and most ideal state--may be so copied that the picture will express all its beauty and sweetness, all its happiness and mirth, all its dignity, and all its moral admonition and significance, for the benefit of the world.

Such a dramatic stock-company, for example (and this is but one of the commendable products of the modern stage), has grown up and crystallised into a form of refined power and symmetry, for the purpose to which it is devoted, under the management of Augustin Daly. That purpose is the acting of comedy. Mr. Daly began management in 1869, and he has remained in it, almost continually, from that time to this. Many players, first and last, have served under his direction. His company has known vicissitudes. But the organisation has not lost its comprehensive form, its competent force, and its attractive quality of essential grace. No thoughtful observer of its career can have failed to perceive how prompt the manager has been to profit by every lesson of experience; what keen perception he has shown as to the essential const.i.tuents of a theatrical troop; with what fine judgment he has used the forces at his disposal; with what intrepid resolution and expeditious energy he has animated their spirit and guided their art; and how naturally those players have glided into their several stations and a.s.similated in one artistic family. How well balanced, how finely equipped, how distinctively able that company is, and what resources of poetry, thought, taste, character, humour, and general capacity it contains, may not, perhaps, be fully appreciated in the pa.s.sing hour. "_Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit._" Fifty years from now, when perchance some veteran, still bright and cheery "in the chimney-nook of age," shall sit in his armchair and prose about the past, with what complacent exultation will he speak of the beautiful Ada Rehan, so bewitching as Peggy in _The Country Girl_, so radiant, vehement, and stormily pa.s.sionate as Katherine; of manly John Drew, with his nonchalant ease, incisive tone, and crisp and graceful method; of n.o.ble Charles Fisher, and sprightly and sparkling James Lewis, and genial, piquant, quaint Mrs. Gilbert! I mark the gentle triumph in that aged reminiscent voice, and can respect an old man"s kindly and natural sympathy with the glories and delights of his vanished youth. But I think it is not necessary to wait till you are old before you begin to praise anything, and then to praise only the dead. Let us recognise what is good in our own time, and honour and admire it with grateful hearts.

NOTE.--At the Garrick club, London, June 26, 1885, it was my fortune to meet Mr. Fladgate, "father of the Garrick," who was then aged 86. The veteran displayed astonishing resources of memory and talked most instructively about the actors of the Kemble period. He declared John Philip Kemble to have been the greatest of actors, and said that his best impersonations were Penruddock, Zanga, and Coriola.n.u.s. Mrs.

Siddons, he said, was incomparable, and the elder Mathews a great genius,--the precursor of d.i.c.kens. For Edmund Kean he had no enthusiasm.

Kean, he said, was at his best in Sir Edward Mortimer, and after that in Shylock. Miss O"Neill he remembered as the perfect Juliet: a beautiful, blue-eyed woman, who could easily weep, and who retained her beauty to the last, dying at 85, as Lady Wrixon Becher.

[Footnote 1: This paper was written in 1888, and now, in 1892, Mr.

Jefferson, Mr. Stoddart, Mrs. Drew, and Mrs. Gilbert are the only survivors of that n.o.ble group.]

II.

HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN FAUST.

It is not surprising that the votaries of Goethe"s colossal poem--a work which, although somewhat deformed and degraded with the pettiness of provincialism, is yet a grand and immortal creation of genius--should find themselves dissatisfied with theatrical expositions of it. Although dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction. More disastrous still, in the eyes of those votaries, it cannot be and it never has been converted into a play without a considerable sacrifice of its contents, its comprehensive scope, its poetry, and its ethical significance. In the poem it is the Man who predominates; it is not the Fiend. Mephistopheles, indeed, might, for the purpose of philosophical apprehension, be viewed as an embodied projection of the mind of Faust; for the power of the one is dependent absolutely upon the weakness and surrender of the other. The object of the poem was the portrayal of universal humanity in a typical form at its highest point of development and in its representative spiritual experience. Faust, an aged scholar, the epitome of human faculties and virtues, grand, venerable, beneficent, blameless, is pa.s.sing miserably into the evening of life. He has done no outward and visible wrong, and yet he is wretched. The utter emptiness of his life--its lack of fulfilment, its lack of sensation--wearies, annoys, disgusts, and torments him. He is divided between an apathy, which heavily weighs him down into the dust, and a pa.s.sionate, spiritual longing, intense, unsatisfied, insatiable, which almost drives him to frenzy. Once, at sunset, standing on a hillside, and looking down upon a peaceful valley, he utters, in a poetic strain of exquisite tenderness and beauty, the final wish of his forlorn and weary soul. It is no longer now the G.o.d-like aspiration and imperious desire of his prime, but it is the sufficient alternative. All he asks now is that he may see the world always as in that sunset vision, in the perfection of happy rest; that he may be permitted, soaring on the wings of the spirit, to follow the sun in its setting ("The day before me and the night behind"), and thus to circle forever round and round this globe, the ecstatic spectator of happiness and peace. He has had enough and more than enough of study, of struggle, of unfulfilled aspiration. Lonely dignity, arid renown, satiety, sorrow, knowledge without hope, and age without comfort,--these are his present portion; and a little way onward, waiting for him, is death. Too old to play with pa.s.sion, too young not to feel desire, he has endured a long struggle between the two souls in his breast--one longing for heaven and the other for the world; but he is beaten at last, and in the abject surrender of despair he determines to die by his own act. A childlike feeling, responsive in his heart to the divine prompting of sacred music, saves him from self-murder; but in a subsequent bitter revulsion he utters a curse upon everything in the state of man, and most of all upon that celestial attribute of patience whereby man is able to endure and to advance in the eternal process of evolution from darkness into light. And now it is, when the soul of the human being, utterly baffled by the mystery of creation, crushed by its own hopeless sorrow, and enraged by the everlasting command to renounce and refrain, has become one delirium of revolt against G.o.d and destiny, that the spirit of perpetual denial, incarnated in Mephistopheles, steps forth to proffer guidance and help. It is as if his rejection and defiance had suddenly become embodied, to aid him in his ruin. More in recklessness than in trust, with no fear, almost with scorn and contempt, he yet agrees to accept this a.s.sistance. If happiness be really possible, if the true way, after all, should lie in the life of the senses, and not in knowledge and reason; if, under the ministrations of this fiend, one hour of life, even one moment of it, shall ever (which is an idle and futile supposition) be so sweet that his heart shall desire it to linger, then, indeed, he will surrender himself eternally to this at present preposterous Mephistopheles, whom his mood, his magic, and the revulsion of his moral nature have evoked:--

"Then let the death-bell chime the token!

Then art thou from thy service free!

The clock may stop, the hand be broken, And time be finished unto me."

Such an hour, it is destined, shall arrive, after many long and miserable years, when, aware of the beneficence of living for others and in the imagined prospect of leading, guiding, and guarding a free people upon a free land, Faust shall be willing to say to the moment: "Stay, thou art so fair"; and Mephistopheles shall harshly cry out: "The clock stands still"; and the graybeard shall sink in the dust; and the holy angels shall fly away with his soul, leaving the Fiend baffled and morose, to gibe at himself over the failure of all his infernal arts.

But, meanwhile, it remains true of the man that no pleasure satisfies him and no happiness contents, and "death is desired, and life a thing unblest."

The man who puts out his eyes must become blind. The sin of Faust is a spiritual sin, and the meaning of all his subsequent terrible experience is that spiritual sin must be--and will be--expiated. No human soul can ever be lost. In every human soul the contest between good and evil must continue until the good has conquered and the evil is defeated and eradicated. Then, when the man"s spirit is adjusted to its environment in the spiritual world, it will be at peace--and not till then. And if this conflict is not waged and completed now and here, it must be and it will be fought out and finished hereafter and somewhere else. It is the greatest of all delusions to suppose that you can escape from yourself.

Judgment and retribution proceed within the soul and not from sources outside of it. That is the philosophic drift of the poet"s thought expressed and implied in his poem. It was Man, in his mortal ordeal--the motive, cause, and necessity of which remain a mystery--whom he desired and aimed to portray; it was not merely the triumph of a mocking devil, temporarily victorious through ministration to animal l.u.s.t and intellectual revolt, over the weakness of the carnal creature and the embittered bewilderment of the baffled mind. Mr. Irving may well say, as he is reported to have said, that he will consider himself to have accomplished a good work if his production of Faust should have the effect of invigorating popular interest in Goethe"s immortal poem and bringing closer home to the mind of his public a true sense of its sublime and far-reaching signification.

The full metaphysical drift of thought and meaning in Goethe"s poem, however, can be but faintly indicated in a play. It is more distinctly indicated in Mr. Wills"s play, which is used by Mr. Irving, than in any other play upon this subject that has been presented. This result, an approximate fidelity to the original, is due in part to the preservation of the witch scenes, in part to Mr. Irving"s subtle and significant impersonation of Mephistopheles, and in part to a weird invest.i.ture of spiritual mystery with which he has artfully environed the whole production. The substance of the piece is the love story of Faust and Margaret, yet beyond this is a background of infinity, and over and around this is a poetic atmosphere charged with suggestiveness of supernatural agency in the fate of man. If the gaze of the observer be concentrated upon the mere structure of the piece, the love story is what he will find; and that is all he will find. Faust makes his compact with the Fiend. He is rejuvenated and he begins a new life. In "the Witch"s Kitchen" his pa.s.sions are intensified, and then they are ignited, so that he may be made the slave of desire and afterward if possible imbruted by sensuality. He is artfully brought into contact with Margaret, whom he instantly loves, who presently loves him, whom he wins, and upon whom, since she becomes a mother out of wedlock, his inordinate and reckless love imposes the burden of pious contrition and worldly shame. Then, through the puissant wickedness and treachery of Mephistopheles, he is made to predominate over her vengeful brother, Valentine, whom he kills in a street fray. Thus his desire to experience in his own person the most exquisite bliss that humanity can enjoy and equally the most exquisite torture that it can suffer, becomes fulfilled. He is now the agonised victim of love and of remorse. Orestes pursued by the Furies was long ago selected as the typical image of supreme anguish and immitigable suffering; but Orestes is less a lamentable figure than Faust--fortified though he is, and because he is, with the awful but malign, treacherous, and now impotent sovereignty of h.e.l.l. To deaden his sensibility, destroy his conscience, and harden him in evil the Fiend leads him into a mad revel of boundless profligacy and b.e.s.t.i.a.l riot--denoted by the beautiful and terrible scene upon the Brocken--and poor Margaret is abandoned to her shame, her wandering, her despair, her frenzy, her crime, and her punishment. This desertion, though, is procured by a stratagem of the Fiend and does not proceed from the design of her lover. The expedient of Mephistopheles, to lull his prey by dissipations, is a failure. Faust finds them "tasteless,"

and he must return to Margaret. He finds her in prison, crazed and dying, and he strives in vain to set her free. There is a climax, whereat, while her soul is borne upward by angels he--whose destiny must yet be fulfilled--is summoned by the terrible voice of Satan. This is the substance of what is shown; but if the gaze of the observer pierces beyond this, if he is able to comprehend that terrific but woeful image of the fallen angel, if he perceives what is by no means obscurely intimated, that Margaret, redeemed and beatified, cannot be happy unless her lover also is saved, and that the soul of Faust can only be lost through the impossible contingency of being converted into the likeness of the Fiend, he will understand that a spectacle has been set before him more august, momentous, and sublime than any episode of tragical human love could ever be.

Henry Irving, in his embodiment of Mephistopheles, fulfilled the conception of the poet in one essential respect and transcended it in another. His performance, superb in ideal and perfect in execution, was a great work--and precisely here was the greatness of it. Mephistopheles as delineated by Goethe is magnificently intellectual and sardonic, but nowhere does he convey even a faint suggestion of the G.o.d-head of glory from which he has lapsed. His own frank and clear avowal of himself leaves no room for doubt as to the limitation intended to be established for him by the poet. I am, he declares, the spirit that perpetually denies. I am a part of that part which once was all--a part of that darkness out of which came the light. I repudiate all things--because everything that has been made is unworthy to exist and ought to be destroyed, and therefore it is better that nothing should ever have been made. G.o.d dwells in splendour, alone and eternal, but his spirits he thrusts into darkness, and man, a poor creature fashioned to poke his nose into filth, he sportively dowers with day and night. My province is evil; my existence is mockery; my pleasure and my purpose are destruction. In a word, this Fiend, towering to the loftiest summit of cold intellect, is the embodiment of cruelty, malice, and scorn, pervaded and interfused with grim humour. That ideal Mr. Irving made actual. The omniscient craft and deadly malignity of his impersonation, swathed in a most specious humour at some moments (as, for example, in Margaret"s bedroom, in the garden scene with Martha, and in the duel scene with Valentine) made the blood creep and curdle with horror, even while they impressed the sense of intellectual power and stirred the springs of laughter. But if you rightly saw his face, in the fantastic, symbolical scene of the Witch"s Kitchen; in that lurid moment of sunset over the quaint gables and haunted spires of Nuremburg, when the sinister presence of the arch-fiend deepened the red glare of the setting sun and seemed to bathe this world in the ominous splendour of h.e.l.l; and, above all, if you perceived the soul that shone through his eyes in that supremely awful moment of his predominance over the h.e.l.lish revel upon the Brocken, when all the hideous malignities of nature and all those baleful "spirits which tend on mortal consequence" are loosed into the aerial abyss, and only this imperial horror can curb and subdue them, you knew that this Mephistopheles was a sufferer not less than a mocker; that his colossal malignity was the delirium of an angelic spirit thwarted, baffled, shattered, yet defiant; never to be vanquished; never through all eternity to be at peace with itself. The infinite sadness of that face, the pathos, beyond words, of that isolated and lonely figure--those are the qualities that irradiated all its diversified attributes of mind, humour, duplicity, sarcasm, force, horror, and infernal beauty, and invested it with the authentic quality of greatness. There is no warrant for this treatment of the part to be derived from Goethe"s poem. There is every warrant for it in the apprehension of this tremendous subject by the imagination of a great actor. You cannot mount above the earth, you cannot transcend the ordinary line of the commonplace, as a mere sardonic image of self-satisfied, chuckling obliquity. Mr. Irving embodied Mephistopheles not as a man but as a spirit, with all that the word implies, and in doing that he not only heeded the fine instinct of the true actor but the splendid teaching of the highest poetry--the ray of supernal light that flashes from the old Hebrew Bible; the blaze that streams from the _Paradise Lost_; the awful glory through which, in the pages of Byron, the typical figure of agonised but unconquerable revolt towers over a realm of ruin:--

"On his brow The thunder-scars are graven; from his eye Glares forth the immortality of h.e.l.l."

Ellen Terry, in her a.s.sumption of Margaret, once more displayed that profound, comprehensive, and particular knowledge of human love--that knowledge of it through the soul and not simply the mind--which is the source of her exceptional and irresistible power. This Margaret was a woman who essentially loves, who exists only for love, who has the courage of her love, who gives all for love--not knowing that it is a sacrifice--and whose love, at last, triumphant over death, is not only her own salvation but that also of her lover. The point of strict conformity to the conception of the poet, in physique and in spiritual state, may be waived. Goethe"s Margaret is a handsome, hardy girl, of humble rank, who sometimes uses bad grammar and who reveals no essential mind. She is just a delicious woman, and there is nothing about her either metaphysical or mysterious. The wise Fiend, who knows that with such a man as Faust the love of such a woman must outweigh all the world, wisely tempts him with her, and infernally lures him to the accomplishment of her ruin. But it will be observed that, aside from the infraction of the law of man, the loves of Faust and Margaret are not only innocent but sacred. This sanct.i.ty Mephistopheles can neither pollute nor control, and through this he loses his victims. Ellen Terry"s Margaret was a delicious woman, and not metaphysical nor mysterious; but it was Margaret imbued with the temperament of Ellen Terry,--who, if ever an exceptional creature lived, is exceptional in every particular. In her embodiment she transfigured the character: she maintained it in an ideal world, and she was the living epitome of all that is fascinating in essential womanhood--glorified by genius. It did not seem like acting but like the revelation of a hallowed personal experience upon which no chill worldly gaze should venture to intrude.

In that suggestive book in which Lady Pollock records her recollections of Macready it is said that once, after his retirement, on reading a London newspaper account of the production of a Shakespearean play, he remarked that "evidently the accessories swallow up the poetry and the action": and he proceeded, in a reminiscent and regretful mood, to speak as follows: "In my endeavour to give to Shakespeare all his attributes, to enrich his poetry with scenes worthy of its interpretation, to give to his tragedies their due magnificence and to his comedies their entire brilliancy, I have set an example which is accompanied with great peril, for the public is willing to have the magnificence without the tragedy, and the poet is swallowed up in display." Mr. Irving is the legitimate successor to Macready and he has encountered that same peril. There are persons--many of them--who think that it is a sign of weakness to praise cordially and to utter admiration with a free heart. They are mistaken, but no doubt they are sincere. Shakespeare, the wisest of monitors, is never so eloquent and splendid as when he makes one of his people express praise of another. Look at those speeches in _Coriola.n.u.s_. Such n.i.g.g.ardly persons, in their detraction of Henry Irving, are prompt to declare that he is a capital stage manager but not a great actor. This has an impartial air and a sapient sound, but it is gross folly and injustice. Henry Irving is one of the greatest actors that have ever lived, and he has shown it over and over again. His acting is all the more effective because a.s.sociated with unmatched ability to insist and insure that every play shall be perfectly well set, in every particular, and that every part in it shall be competently acted. But his genius and his ability are no more discredited than those of Macready were by his attention to technical detail and his insistence upon total excellence of result. It should be observed, however, that he has carried stage garniture to an extreme limit. His invest.i.ture of _Faust_ was so magnificent that possibly it may have tended in the minds of many spectators, to obscure and overwhelm the fine intellectual force, the beautiful delicacy, and the consummate art with which he embodied Mephistopheles. It ought not to have produced that effect--because, in fact, the spectacle presented was, actually and truly, that of a supernatural being, predominant by force of inherent strength and charm over the broad expanse of the populous and teeming world; but it might have produced it: and, for the practical good of the art of acting, progress in that direction has gone far enough. The supreme beauty of the production was the poetic atmosphere of it--the irradiation of that strange sensation of being haunted which sometimes will come upon you, even at noon-day, in lonely places, on vacant hillside, beneath the dark boughs of great trees, in the presence of the grim and silent rocks, and by the solitary margin of the sea. The feeling was that of Goethe"s own weird and suggestive scene of the Open Field, the black horses, and the raven-stone; or that of the shuddering lines of Coleridge:--

"As one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on And turns no more his head, Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread."

III.