Shadows of the Stage Part 5

Charlotte Cushman was born on July 23, 1816, and she died on February 12, 1876. Boston was the place of her birth and of her death. She lived till her sixtieth year and she was for forty years an actress. Her youth was one of poverty and the early years of her professional career were full of labour, trouble, heart-ache, and conflict. The name of Cushman signifies "cross-bearer," and certainly Charlotte Cushman did indeed bear the cross, long before and long after, she wore the crown. At first she was a vocalist, but, having broken her voice by misusing it, she was compelled to quit the lyric and adopt the dramatic stage, and when nineteen years old she came out, at New Orleans, as Lady Macbeth. After that she removed to New York and for the next seven years she battled with adverse fortune in the theatres of that city and of Albany and Philadelphia. From 1837 to 1840 she was under engagement at the old Park as walking lady and for general utility business. "I became aware," she wrote, "that one could never sail a s.h.i.+p by entering at the cabin windows; he must serve and learn his trade before the mast. This was the way that I would henceforth learn mine."

Her first remarkable hits were made in Emilia, Meg Merrilies, and Nancy--the latter in _Oliver Twist_. But it was not till she met with Macready that the day of her deliverance from drudgery really dawned.

They acted together in New York in 1842 and 1843, and in Boston in 1844, and in the autumn of the latter year Miss Cushman went to England, where, after much effort, she obtained an opening in London, at the Princess's, and in 1845 made her memorable success as Bianca. "Since the first appearance of Edmund Kean, in 1814," said a London journal of that time, "never has there been such a _debut_ on the stage of an English theatre." Her engagement lasted eighty-four nights (it was an engagement to act with Edwin Forrest), and she recorded its result in a letter to her mother, saying: "All my successes put together since I have been upon the stage would not come near my success in London, and I only wanted some one of you here to enjoy it with me, to make it complete." She acted Bianca, Emilia, Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Haller, and Rosalind. A prosperous provincial tour followed, and then, in December, 1845, she came out at the Haymarket, as Romeo, her sister Susan appearing as Juliet. Her stay abroad lasted till the end of the summer of 1849, and to that period belongs her great achievement as Queen Katharine.

From the fall of 1849 till the spring of 1852 Miss Cushman was in America, and she was everywhere received with acclamation, gathering with ease both laurels and riches. When she first reappeared, October 8, 1849, at the old Broadway theatre, New York--as Mrs. Haller--she introduced Charles W. Couldock to our stage, on which he has ever since maintained his rank as a powerful and versatile actor. He acted the Stranger and subsequently was seen in the other leading characters opposite to her own. Miss Cushman's repertory then included Lady Macbeth, Queen Katharine, Meg Merrilies, Beatrice, Rosalind, Bianca, Julia, Mariana, Katharine, the Countess, Pauline, Juliana, Lady Gay Spanker, and Mrs. Simpson. Her princ.i.p.al male characters then, or later, were Romeo, Wolsey, Hamlet, and Claude Melnotte. In 1852 she announced her intention of retiring from the stage, and from that time till the end of her days she wavered between retirement and professional occupation. The explanation of this is readily divined, in her condition. There never was a time, during all those years, when she was not haunted by dread of the disease that ultimately destroyed her life.

From 1852 to 1857 she lived in England, and in the course of that period she acted many times, in different cities. In December 1854, when dining with the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re, at Brighton, she read _Henry VIII._ to the Duke and his guests, and in that way began her experience as a reader.

In the autumn of 1857 she acted at Burton's theatre, New York, and was seen as Cardinal Wolsey, and in the early summer of 1858 she gave a series of "farewell" performances at Niblo's Garden--after which she again crossed the Atlantic and established her residence in Rome. In June 1860 the great actress came home again and pa.s.sed a year in America. _Oliver Twist_ was given at the Winter Garden in the spring of 1861, when Miss Cushman acted Nancy, and J.W. Wallack, Jr., J.B.

Studley, William Davidge, and Owen Marlowe were in the company. In 1863, having come from Rome for that purpose, Miss Cushman acted in four cities, for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission, and earned for it $8267. The seven ensuing years were pa.s.sed by her in Europe, but in October 1870 she returned home for the last time, and the brief remainder of her life was devoted to public readings, occasional dramatic performances, and the society of friends. She built a villa at Newport, which still bears her name. She gave final farewell performances, in the season of 1874-1875, in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Her final public appearance was made on June 2, 1875, at Easton, Pennsylvania, where she gave a reading. Her death occurred at the Parker House, in Boston, February 18, 1876, and she was buried from King's chapel.

There is a mournful pleasure in recalling the details of Miss Cushman's life and meditating upon her energetic, resolute, patient, creative nature. She was faithful, throughout her career, to high principles of art and a high standard of duty. Nature gave her great powers but fettered her also with great impediments. She conquered by the spell of a strange, weird genius and by hard, persistent labour. In this latter particular she is an example to every member of the dramatic profession, present or future. In what she was as a woman she could not be imitated--for her colossal individuality dwelt apart, in its loneliness, as well of suffering that no one could share as of an imaginative life that no one could fathom. Without the stage she would still have been a great woman, although perhaps she might have lacked an entirely suitable vehicle for the display of her powers. With the stage she gave a body to the soul of some of Shakespeare's greatest conceptions, and she gave soul and body both to many works of inferior origin. There is no likelihood that we shall ever see again such a creation as her Meg Merrilies. Her genius could embody the sublime, the beautiful, the terrible, and with all this the humorous; and it was saturated with goodness. If the love of beauty was intensified by the influence of her art, virtue was also strengthened by the force of her example and the inherent dignity of her nature.

XIV.

ON THE DEATH OF LAWRENCE BARRETT.

[Obiit March 20, 1891.]

The death of Lawrence Barrett was the disappearance of one of the n.o.blest figures of the modern stage. During the whole of his career, in a public life of thirty-five years, he was steadily and continuously impelled by a pure and fine ambition and the objects that he sought to accomplish were always the worthiest and the best. His devotion to the dramatic art was a pa.s.sionate devotion, and in an equal degree he was devoted to a high ideal of personal conduct. Doctrines of expediency never influenced him and indeed were never considered by him. He had early fixed his eyes on the dramatic sceptre. He knew that it never could be gained except by the greatest and brightest of artistic achievements, and to them accordingly he consecrated his life. Whenever and wherever he appeared the community was impressed with a sense of intellectual character, moral worth, and individual dignity. Many other dramatic efforts might be trivial. Those of Lawrence Barrett were always felt to be important. Most of the plays with which his name is identified are among the greatest plays in our language, and the spirit in which he treated them was that of exalted scholars.h.i.+p, austere reverence, and perfect refinement. He was profoundly true to all that is n.o.ble and beautiful, and because he was true the world of art everywhere recognised him as the image of fidelity and gave to him the high tribute of its unwavering homage. His coming was always a signal to arouse the mind. His mental vitality, which was very great, impressed even unsympathetic beholders with a sense of fiery thought struggling in its fetters of mortality and almost shattering and consuming the frail temple of its human life. His stately head, silvered with graying hair, his dark eyes deeply sunken and glowing with intense light, his thin visage pallid with study and pain, his form of grace and his voice of sonorous eloquence and solemn music (in compa.s.s, variety, and sweetness one of the few great voices of the current dramatic generation), his tremendous earnestness, his superb bearing, and his invariable authority and distinction--all those attributes united to announce a ruler and leader in the realm of the intellect. The exceeding tumult of his spirit enhanced the effect of this mordant personality. The same sleepless energy that inspired Loyola and Lanfranc burned in the bosom of this modern actor; and it was entirely in keeping with the drift of his character and the tenor of his life that the last subject that occupied his thoughts should have been the story of Becket, the great prelate--whom he intended to represent, and to whom in mental qualities he was nearly allied. In losing Lawrence Barrett the American stage lost the one man who served it with an apostle's zeal because he loved it with an apostle's love.

The essential attributes that Lawrence Barrett did not possess were enchantment for the public and adequate and philosophic patience for himself. He gained, indeed, a great amount of public favour, and,--with reference to an indisputable lack of universal sympathy and enthusiasm,--he was learning to regard that as a natural consequence of his character which formerly he had resented as the injustice of the world. Men and women of austere mind do not fascinate their fellow-creatures. They impress by their strangeness. They awe by their majesty. They predominate by their power. But they do not involuntarily entice. Lawrence Barrett,--although full of kindness and gentleness, and, to those who knew him well, one of the most affectionate and lovable of men,--was essentially a man of austere intellect; and his experience was according to his nature. To some persons the world gives everything, without being asked to give at all. To others it gives only what it must, and that with a kind of icy reluctance that often makes the gift a bitter one. Lawrence Barrett, who rose from an obscure and humble position,--without fortune, without friends, without favouring circ.u.mstances, without education, without help save that of his talents and his will,--was for a long time met with indifference, or frigid obstruction, or impatient disparagement. He gained nothing without battle. He had to make his way by his strength. His progress involved continual effort and his course was attended with continual controversy and strife. When at last it had to be conceded that he was a great actor, the concession was, in many quarters, grudgingly made. Even then detraction steadily followed him, and its voice--though impotent and immeasurably trivial--has not yet died away. There came a time when his worth was widely recognised, and from that moment onward he had much prosperity, and his nature expanded and grew calmer, sweeter, and brighter under its influence. But the habit of warfare had got into his acting, and more or less it remained there to the last. The a.s.sertive quality, indeed, had long since begun to die away. The volume of needless emphasis was growing less and less. Few performances on the contemporary stage are commensurate with his embodiments of Harebell and Gringoire, in softness, simplicity, poetic charm, and the gentle tranquillity that is the repose of a self-centred soul. But his deep and burning desire to be understood, his anxiety lest his effects should not be appreciated, his inveterate purpose of conquest,--that overwhelming solicitude of ambition often led him to insist upon his points, to over-elaborate and enforce them, and in that way his art to some extent defeated itself by the excess of its eager zeal. The spirit of beauty that the human race pursues is the spirit that is typified in Emerson's poem of _Forerunners_--the elusive spirit that all men feel and no man understands. This truth, undiscerned by him at first, had become the conviction of his riper years; and if his life had been prolonged the autumn of his professional career would have been gentle, serene, and full of tranquil loveliness.

The achievement of Lawrence Barrett as an actor was great, but his influence upon the stage was greater than his achievement. Among the Shakespearian parts that he played were Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Oth.e.l.lo, Iago, Shylock, Leontes, Ca.s.sius, Wolsey, Richard III., Romeo, and Bened.i.c.k. Outside of Shakespeare (to mention only a few of his impersonations) he acted Richelieu, Evelyn, Aranza, Garrick, Claude Melnotte, Rienzi, Dan'l Druce, Lanciotto, Hernani, King Arthur, and Ganelon. The parts in which he was superlatively fine,--and in some respects incomparable,--are Ca.s.sius, Harebell, Yorick, Gringoire, King Arthur, Ganelon, and James V., King of the Commons. In his time he had played hundreds of parts, ranging over the whole field of the drama, but as the years pa.s.sed and the liberty of choice came more and more within his reach, he concentrated his powers upon a few works and upon a specific line of expression. The aspect of human nature and human experience that especially aroused his sympathy was the loneliness of beneficent intellectual grandeur, isolated by its supremacy and pathetic in its isolation. He loved the character of Richelieu, and if he had acted Becket, as he purposed to do, in Tennyson's tragedy, he would have presented another and a different type of that same ideal--lonely, austere, pa.s.sionate age, defiant of profane authority and protective of innocent weakness against wicked and cruel strength. His embodiment of Ca.s.sius, with all its intensity of repressed spleen and caustic malevolence, was softly touched and sweetly enn.o.bled with the majesty of venerable loneliness,--the bleak light of pathetic sequestration from human ties, without the forfeiture of human love,--that is the natural adjunct of intellectual greatness. He loved also the character of Harebell, because in that he could express his devotion to the beautiful, the honest impulses of his affectionate heart, and his ideal of a friends.h.i.+p that is too pure and simple even to dream that such a thing as guile can exist anywhere in the world. Toward the expression, under dramatic conditions, of natures such as those, the development of his acting was steadily directed; and, even if he fell short, in any degree, of accomplis.h.i.+ng all that he purposed, it is certain that his spirit and his conduct dignified the theatrical profession, strengthened the stage in the esteem of good men, and cheered the heart and fired the energy of every sincere artist that came within the reach of his example. For his own best personal success he required a part in which, after long repression, the torrent of pa.s.sion can break loose in a tumult of frenzy and a wild strain of eloquent words. The terrible exultation of Ca.s.sius, after the fall of Caesar, the ecstasy of Lanciotto when he first believes himself to be loved by Francesca, the delirium of Yorick when he can no longer restrain the doubts that madden his jealous and wounded soul, the rapture of King James over the vindication of his friend Seyton, whom his suspicions have wronged--those were among his distinctively great moments, and his image as he was in such moments is worthy to live among the storied traditions and the bright memories of the stage.

Censure seems to be easy to most people, and few men are rated at their full value while they are yet alive. Just as mountains seem more sublime in the vague and hazy distance, so a n.o.ble mind looms grandly through the dusk of death. So it will be with him. Lawrence Barrett was a man of high principle and perfect integrity. He never spoke a false word nor knowingly harmed a human being, in all his life. Although sometimes he seemed to be harsh and imperious, he was at heart kind and humble.

Strife with the world, and in past times uncertainty as to his position, caused in him the a.s.sumption of a stern and frigid manner, but beneath that haughty reserve there was a great longing for human affection and a sincere humility of spirit. He never nurtured hostility. He had no memory for injuries; but a kindness he never forgot. His good deeds were as numerous as his days--for no day rolled over his head without its act of benevolence in one direction or another. He was as impulsive as a child. He had much of the woman in his nature, and therefore his views were impetuous, strong, and often strongly stated; but his sense of humour kept pace with his sensibility and so maintained the equilibrium of his mind. In temperament he was sad, pensive, introspective, almost gloomy; but he opposed to that tendency an incessant mental activity and the force of a tremendous will. In his lighter moods he was not only appreciative of mirth but was the cause of it. His humour was elemental and whatever aspect of life he saw in a comic light he could set in that light before the eyes of others. He had been a studious reader for many years and his mind was stored with ample, exact, and diversified information. He had a scholar's knowledge of Roman history and his familiar acquaintance with the character and career of the first Napoleon was extraordinary. In acting he was largely influenced by his studies of Edmund Kean and by his a.s.sociation with Charlotte Cushman.

For a few years after 1864 his art was especially affected by that of Edwin Booth; but the style to which he finally gravitated was his own.

He was not so much an impersonator as he was an interpreter of character, and the elocutionary part of acting was made more conspicuous and important by him than by any other tragedian since the days of Forrest and Brooke.

It was a beautiful life prematurely ended. It was a brave, strong spirit suddenly called out of the world. To the dramatic profession the loss is irreparable. In the condition of the contemporary theatre there are not many hopeful signs. No doubt there will be bright days in the future, as there have been in the past. They go and they return. The stage declines and the stage advances. At present its estate is low. Few men like Lawrence Barrett remain for it to lose. Its main hope is in the abiding influence of such examples as he has left. The old theatrical period is fast pa.s.sing away. The new age rushes on the scene, with youthful vigour and impetuous tumult. But to some of us,--who perhaps have not long to stay, and to whom, whatever be their fortune, this tumult is unsympathetic and insignificant,--the way grows darker and lonelier as we lay our garlands of eternal farewell upon the coffin of Lawrence Barrett.

XV.

HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN RAVENSWOOD.

Merivale's play of _Ravenswood_, written in four acts, was acted in six.

The first act consists of a single scene--an exterior, showing the environment of the chapel which is the burial place of the House of Ravenswood. A rockbound coast is visible, at some distance, together with the ruinous tower of Wolf's Crag--which is Ravenswood's sole remaining possession. This act presents the interrupted funeral of Alan Ravenswood, the father of Edgar,--introducing ten of the seventeen characters that are implicated in the piece, and skilfully laying the basis of the action by exhibiting the essential personalities of the story in strong contrast, and denoting their relations to each other.

Each character is clearly and boldly drawn and with a light touch. The second act consists of three scenes--an antique library in the ancient manor-house of Ravenswood, a room in a roadside ale-house, and a room in the dilapidated tower of Wolf's Crag. This act rapidly develops the well-known story, depicting the climax of antagonism between the Lord Keeper Ashton and Edgar of Ravenswood and their subsequent reconciliation. The third act pa.s.ses in a lovely, romantic, rural scene, which is called "the Mermaiden's Well,"--a fairy-like place in the grounds of Ravenswood,--and in this scene Edgar and Lucy Ashton, who have become lovers, are plighted by themselves and parted by Lucy's mother, Lady Ashton. The fourth and last act shows a room at Ravenswood, wherein is portrayed the betrothal of Lucy to Bucklaw, culminating in Edgar's sudden irruption; and finally, it shows the desolate seaside place of the quicksand in which, after he has slain Bucklaw, Edgar of Ravenswood is engulfed. The house that Scott, when he wrote the novel, had in his mind as that of Sir William Ashton is the house of Winston, which still is standing, not many miles from Edinburgh. The tower of Wolf's Crag was probably suggested to him by Fast Castle, the ruin of which still lures the traveller's eye, upon the iron-ribbed and gloomy coast of the North Sea, a few miles southeast of Dunbar--a place, however, that Scott never visited, and never saw except from the ocean.

There is a beach upon that coast, just above c.o.c.kburnspath, that might well have suggested to him the quicksand and the final catastrophe. I saw it when the morning sun was s.h.i.+ning upon it and upon the placid waters just rippling on its verge; and even in the glad glow of a summer day it was grim with silent menace and mysterious with an air of sinister secrecy. In the preparation of this piece for the stage all the sources and a.s.sociations of the subject were considered; and the pictorial setting, framed upon the right artistic principle--that imagination should transfigure truth and thus produce the essential result of poetic effect--was elaborate and magnificent. And the play is the best one that ever has been made upon this subject.

The basis of fact upon which Sir Walter Scott built his novel of the _Bride of Lammermoor_ is given in the introduction that he wrote for it in 1829. Janet Dalrymple, daughter of the first Lord Stair and of his wife Margaret Ross, had privately plighted herself to Lord Rutherford.

Those lovers had broken a piece of gold together, and had bound themselves by vows the most solemn and fervent that pa.s.sion could prompt. But Lord Rutherford was objectionable to Miss Dalrymple's parents, who liked not either his family or his politics. Lady Stair, furthermore, had selected a husband for her daughter, in the person of David Dunbar, of Baldoon; and Lady Stair was a woman of formidable character, set upon having her own way and accustomed to prevail. As soon as she heard of Janet's private engagement to Lord Rutherford she declared the vow to be undutiful and unlawful and she commanded that it should be broken. Lord Rutherford, a man of energy and of spirit, thereupon insisted that he would take his dismissal only from the lips of Miss Dalrymple herself, and he demanded and obtained an interview with her. Lady Stair was present, and such was her ascendency over her daughter's mind that the young lady remained motionless and mute, permitting her betrothal to Lord Rutherford to be broken, and, upon her mother's command, giving back to him the piece of gold that was the token of her promise. Lord Rutherford was deeply moved, so that he uttered curses upon Lady Stair, and at the last reproached Janet in these words: "For you, madam, you will be a world's wonder." After this sad end of his hopes the unfortunate gentleman went abroad and died in exile. Janet Dalrymple and David Dunbar meanwhile were married--the lady "being absolutely pa.s.sive in everything her mother commanded or advised." As soon, however, as the wedded pair had retired from the bridal feast hideous shrieks were heard to resound through the house, proceeding from the nuptial chamber. The door was thereupon burst open and persons entering saw the bridegroom stretched upon the floor, wounded and bleeding, while the bride, dishevelled and stained with blood, was grinning in a paroxysm of insanity. All she said was, "Take up your bonny bridegroom." About two weeks later she died. The year of those events was 1669. The wedding took place on August 24. Janet died on September 12. Dunbar recovered, but he would never tell what occurred in that chamber of horror, nor indeed would he permit any allusion to the subject. He did not long survive the tragic event,--having been fatally injured, by a fall from his horse, when riding between Leith and Holyrood. He died on March 28, 1682. The death of Lord Rutherford is a.s.signed to the year 1685. Such is the melancholy story as it may be gathered from Scott's preface. In writing his novel that great master of the art of fiction,--never yet displaced from his throne or deprived of his sceptre,--adopted fict.i.tious names, invented fresh circ.u.mstances, amplified and elevated the characters, judiciously veiled the localities, and advanced the period of those tragical incidents to about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The delicate taste with which he used his materials has only been surpa.s.sed, in that beautiful composition, by the affluent genius with which he vitalised every part of his narrative. In no other of his many books has he shown a deeper knowledge than is revealed in that one of the terrible pa.s.sion of love and of the dark and sinuous ways of political and personal craft. When _The Bride of Lammermoor_ was first published no mention was made in it of the true story upon which remotely it had been based; but by the time Scott came to write the preface of 1829 other writers had been less reticent, and some account of the Dalrymple tragedy had got into print, so that no reason existed for further silence on that subject.

Sir Robert H.D. Elphinstone, writing in 1829, gave the tradition as follows: "When, after the noise and violent screaming in the bridal chamber comparative stillness succeeded and the door was forced, the window was found open, and it was supposed by many that the lover, Lord Rutherford, had, by the connivance of some of the servants, found means, during the bustle of the marriage feast, to secrete himself within the apartment, and that soon after the entry of the married pair, or at least as soon as the parents and others retreated and the door was made fast, he had come out from his concealment, attacked and desperately wounded the bridegroom, and then made his escape, by the window, through the garden. As the unfortunate bride never spoke after having uttered the words mentioned by Sir Walter, no light could be thrown on the matter by them. But it was thought that Dunbar's obstinate silence on the subject favoured the supposition of the chastis.e.m.e.nt having been inflicted by his rival. It is but fair to give the unhappy victim (who was, by all accounts, a most gentle and feminine creature) the benefit of an explanation on a doubtful point."

Merivale, in dealing with this story, gave a conspicuous ill.u.s.tration of the essential dramatic faculty. The first act is the adroit expansion of a few paragraphs, in the second chapter of the novel, which are descriptive of the bleak, misty November morning when Alan Ravenswood was borne to the grave; but by the introduction of the Lord Keeper and of the village crones into that funeral scene he opened the whole subject, indicated all the essential antecedents of the story, and placed his characters in a posture of lively action. That the tone is sombre must be conceded, and people who think that the chief end of man is to grin might condemn the piece for that reason; but _Ravenswood_ is a tragedy and not a farce, and persons who wish that their feelings may not be affected should avoid tragedies.

In the second act Ravenswood seeks Ashton at Ravenswood manor, intending to kill him in a duel, but his hand is stayed when he catches sight of Lucy Ashton's portrait. The incident of Edgar's rescue of Lucy is used in this scene. In a later scene Sir William Ashton and his daughter take refuge in Wolf's Crag, and the bewitchment of Ravenswood is accomplished. The quarrel between Edgar and Bucklaw is then given, as a basis for the ensuing rivalry and deadly conflict between them. In the third act there is a beautiful love-scene between Edgar and Lucy, the dialogue being especially felicitous in tenderness and grace and fraught with that reverential quality, that condition of commingled ecstasy and n.o.bleness, which is always characteristic of the experience of this pa.s.sion in pure natures. Lady Ashton's interruption of their happiness and the subsequent parting have a vigorous dramatic effect. The character of Lucy has been much strengthened, so that it differs from that of the original precisely as Desdemona differs from Ophelia; and the change is an improvement. The fourth act opens with "a song of choristers heard outside." The letters of Lucy and Edgar have been intercepted. The lady has been told that her lover is false. The suit of Bucklaw has been urged. The authority of the stern mother has prevailed over her daughter's will. It is the old story. "The absent are always wrong"--and Ravenswood is absent. Lucy Ashton yields to her fate. The marriage contract between Lucy and Bucklaw has just been signed when Ravenswood bursts into the group. From that point the action is animated equally with celerity and pa.s.sion. The misery of Ravenswood utters itself in a swift stream of burning words. The grief of Lucy ends tragically in a broken heart and sudden death. The fight between Bucklaw and Ravenswood clashes for a moment but is abruptly finished on the moonlit sands, and Edgar is seen to leap down from a rock and rush away toward the manor, where, as his dying foe has told him, the faithful and innocent Lucy lies dead. He disappears and comes no more; but his old servant takes up from the beach a single black plume--the feather of a raven--which the tide has washed ash.o.r.e, and which is the last relic and emblem of the vanished master of Ravenswood.

The tragedy is kindred, as to its spirit, with _Romeo and Juliet_, and like that representative poem of love and death it is intensely pa.s.sionate, sombre, and lamentable. The first and second acts of it pa.s.s in almost unrelieved shadow. It begins with a funeral; it incorporates the ingredients of misery, madness, and death; it culminates in a fatal duel; and it ends in a picture of mortal desolation, qualified only by a mute suggestion of spiritual happiness conveyed by the pictorial emblem of the promise of immortality. It is a poetical tragedy, conceived in the spirit and written in the manner of the old masters of the poetic art. The treatment of Scott's novel is marked by scrupulous fidelity, not indeed to every detail of that n.o.ble book, but to its essential quality and tone. The structure of the play reproduces in action substantially the structure of the original story. The scene in which Edgar and Lucy avow their love and pledge themselves to each other is written with exquisite grace and profound tenderness. The picture presented upon the stage when the lovers are parted was one of astonis.h.i.+ng animation. The scene of the interrupted wedding and of Lucy Ashton's agony, distraction, and death was one of intense power and dramatic effect. The duel of Ravenswood and Bucklaw upon the desolate, moon-lit sands was invested with the excitement of suspense and with weird horror. And the final exposition of dramatic contrast,--when upon the wide, bleak beach, with the waste of vacant sea beyond and the eastern heaven lit with the first splendour of sunrise, the old man stooped to take up the raven's feather, the last relic of Ravenswood--was so entirely beautiful that the best of words can but poorly indicate its loveliness. For an audience able to look seriously at a serious subject, and not impatient of the foreground of gloom in which, necessarily, the story is enveloped at its beginning, this was a perfect work. The student of drama must go back many years to find a parallel to it, in interest of subject, in balance, in symmetry, and in sympathetic interpretation of character.

There is a quality of Hamlet in the character of Ravenswood. He is by nature a man of a sad mind, and under the pressure of afflicting circ.u.mstances his sadness has become embittered. He takes life thoughtfully and with pa.s.sionate earnestness. He is a n.o.ble person, finely sensitive and absolutely sincere, full of kindness at heart, but touched with gloom; and his aspect and demeanour are those of pride, trouble, self-conflict--of an individuality isolated and constrained by dark thoughts and painful experience. That is the mood in which Henry Irving conceived and portrayed him. You saw a picturesque figure, dark, strange, romantic--the gravity engendered by thought and sorrow not yet marring the bronzed face and the elastic movement of youth--and this personality, in itself fascinating, was made all the more pictorial by an invest.i.ture of romance, alike in the scenery and the incidents through which it moved. Around such a figure funereal banners well might wave, and under dark and lowering skies the chill wind of the sea might moan through monastic ruins and crumbling battlements. Edgar of Ravenswood, standing by his lonely hearth, beneath the groined arches of his seaside tower, revealed by the flickering firelight, looked the ideal of romantic manhood; the incarnation of poetic fancy and of predestinate disaster. Above the story of _Ravenswood_ there is steadily and continuously impending, and ever growing darker and coming nearer, the vague menace of terrible calamity. This element of mystery and dread was wrought into the structural fibre of Henry Irving's performance of the part, and consistently coloured it. The face of Edgar was made to wear that haunted look which,--as in the countenance of Charles the First, in Vand.y.k.e's portraits,--may be supposed, and often has been supposed, to foreshadow a violent and dreadful death. His sudden tremor, when at the first kiss of Lucy Ashton the thunder is heard to break above his ruined home, was a fine denotement of that subtle quality; and even through the happiness of the betrothal scene there was a hint of this black presentiment--just as sometimes on a day of perfect suns.h.i.+ne there is a chill in the wind that tells of approaching storm. All this is warranted by the prophetic rhymes which are several times spoken, beginning--"When the last lord of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride."

A crone, Ailsie Gourlay by name, embodied with grim and grisly vigour by Alice Marriott,--whose ample voice and exact elocution, together with her formidable stature and her faculty of identification with the character that she a.s.sumes and with the spirit of the story, made her of great value to this play--hovered around Ravenswood, and aided to keep this presage of evil doom fitfully present in the consciousness of its victim. Henry Irving gave to the part its perfectly distinct individuality, and in that respect made as fine a showing as he has ever made of his authority as an actor. There was never the least doubt as to what Ravenswood is and what he means. The peculiar elocution of Henry Irving, when he is under the influence of great excitement, is not effective upon all persons; but those who like it consider it far more touching than a more level, more sonorous, and more accurate delivery.

He wrought a great effect in the scene of the marriage-contract. Indeed, so powerful, sincere, and true was the acting upon all sides, at this point, that not until the curtain began to descend was it remembered that we were looking upon a fiction and not upon a fact. This points to the peculiar power that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry conspicuously possess--of creating and maintaining a perfect illusion.

During the earlier scenes the character of Lucy Ashton is chiefly marked by the qualities of sweetness and of glee. No one acquainted with the acting of Ellen Terry would need to be told how well and with what charming grace those qualities were expressed by her. In the scene of the wooing, at the Mermaiden's Well, Lucy Ashton was not a cold woman trying to make herself loved,--which is what most actresses habitually proffer upon the stage,--but a loving woman, radiant with the consciousness of the love that she feels and has inspired. Nothing could be imagined more delicate, more delicious, more enchanting than the high-bred distinction and soft womanlike tone of that performance. The character, at the climax of this scene, is made to manifest decision, firmness, and force; and the superb manner in which she set the maternal authority at naught and stood by her lover might seem to denote a nature that no tyranny could subdue. Subdued, however, she is, and forced to believe ill of her absent lover, and so the fatal marriage contract is signed and the crash follows. When Ellen Terry came on for that scene the glee had all vanished; the face was as white as the garments that enswathed her; and you saw a creature whom the hand of death had visibly touched. The stage has not at any time heard from any lips but her own such tones of pathos as those in which she said the simple words:--

"May G.o.d forgive you, then, and pity me-- If G.o.d can pity more than mothers do."

It is not a long scene, and happily not,--for the strain upon the emotion of the actress was intense. The momentary wild merriment, the agony of the breaking heart, the sudden delirium and collapse, were not for an instant exaggerated. All was nature--or rather the simplicity, fidelity, and grace of art that make the effect of nature.

Beautiful scenery, painted by Craven, framed the piece with appropriate magnificence. The several seaside pictures were admirably representative of the grandeur, the gaunt loneliness, and the glorious colour for which Scotland is so much loved.

The public gain in that production was a revival of interest in one of the most famous novels in the language; the possession of a scenical pageant that filled the eye with beauty and strongly moved the imagination; a play that is successful in the domain of romantic poetry; a touching exemplification of the great art of acting; and once again the presentment of that vast subject,--the relation of heart to heart, under the dominion of love, in human society,--that more absorbs the attention, affects the character, and controls the destiny of the human race than anything else that is beneath the sun.

XVI.

THE MERRY WIVES AND FALSTAFF.

Shakespeare wrote _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ in 1601, and during the Christmas holidays of that year it was presented upon the stage, before Queen Elizabeth and her court, at Windsor Castle. In 1602 it was published in London in quarto form, and in 1619 a reprint of that quarto was published there. The version that appears in the two quartos is considered by Shakespeare scholars to be spurious. The authentic text, no doubt, is that of the comedy as it stands in the first folio (1623).

Shakespeare had written _Henry IV._--both parts of it--and also _Henry V._, when this comedy was acted, and therefore he had completed his portrait of Falstaff, whose life is displayed in the former piece and whose death is described in the latter. _Henry IV._ was first printed in 1598 (we know not when it was first acted), and it pa.s.sed through five quarto editions prior to the publication of it in the folio of 1623. In the epilogue to the second part of that play a promise is made that the story shall be continued, "with Sir John in it," but it is gravely doubted whether that epilogue was written by Shakespeare. The continuation of the story occurs in _Henry V._, in which Falstaff does not figure, although he is mentioned in it. Various efforts have been made to show a continuity between the several plays in which Falstaff is implicated, but the attempt always fails. The histories contain the real Falstaff. The Falstaff of the comedy is another and less important man.

If there really were a sequence of story and of time in the portraiture of this character plays would stand in the following order: 1, _Henry IV., Part First_; 2, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_; 3, _Henry IV., Part Second_; 4, _Henry V._ As no such sequence exists, or apparently was intended, the comedy should be viewed by itself. Its texture is radically different from that of the histories. One of the best Shakespeare editors, Charles Knight, ventures the conjecture that _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ was written first. Shakespeare invented the chief part of the plot, taking, however, a few things from Tarlton's _Newes out of Purgatorie_, which in turn was founded on a story called The _Lovers of Pisa_. It is possible also that he may have derived suggestions from a German play by Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick--a contemporary, who died in 1611--to which _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ bears some resemblance, and of which he may have received an account from English actors who had visited Germany, as the actors of his time occasionally did.

Tradition declares that he wrote this comedy at the command of Queen Elizabeth, who had expressed a wish to see Falstaff in love. This was first stated by John Dennis, in the preface to an alteration of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ which was made by him, under the name of _The Comical Gallant, or the Amours of Sir John Falstaff_, and was successfully acted at Drury Lane theatre. That piece, which is paltry and superfluous, appeared in 1702. No authority was given by Dennis for his statement about Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare's play. The tradition rests exclusively on his word. Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and other Shakespeare editors, have transmitted it to the present day, but it rests on nothing but supposition and it is dubious. Those scholars who accept the story of Dennis, and believe that Shakespeare wrote the piece "to order" and within a few days, usually fortify their belief by the allegation that the comedy falls short of Shakespeare's poetical standard, being written mostly in prose; that it degrades his great creation of Falstaff; that it is, for him, a trivial production; and that it must have been written in haste and without spontaneous impulse.

If judgment were to be given on the quarto version of _The Merry Wives_, that reasoning would commend itself as at least plausible; but it is foolish as applied to the version in the folio, where the piece is found to be remarkable for nimbleness of invention, strength and variety of natural character, affluent prodigality of animal spirits, delicious quaintness, exhilarating merriment, a lovely pastoral tone, and many touches of the transcendent poetry of Shakespeare. Dennis probably repeated a piece of idle gossip that he had heard, the same sort of chatter that in the present day constantly follows the doings of theatrical people,--and is not accurate more than once in a thousand times. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ is a brilliant and delightful comedy, quite worthy of its great author (though not in his most exalted mood), who probably wrote it because his mind was naturally impelled to write it, and no doubt laboured over it exactly as he did over his other writings: for we know, upon the testimony of Ben Jonson, who personally knew him and was acquainted with his custom as a writer, that he was not content with the first draught of anything, but wrote it a second time, and a third time, before he became satisfied with it. Dr.

Johnson, who had studied Shakespeare as carefully as any man ever studied him, speaking of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, says that "its general power--that power by which all works of genius should finally be tried--is such that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator who did not think it too soon at an end." A comedy that deserves such praise as this--which a.s.suredly is not misplaced--need not be dismissed as a pot-boiler.

Knight's conjecture that _The Merry Wives_ was written before the histories were written is a plausible conjecture, and perhaps worthy of some consideration. It is not easy to believe that Shakespeare, after he had created Falstaff and thoroughly drawn him, was capable of lessening the character and making it almost despicable with paltriness--as certainly it becomes in _The Merry Wives_. That is not the natural way of an artistic mind. But it is easier to credit the idea that the Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ was the first study of the character, although not first shown, which subsequently expanded into the magnificent humorous creation of the histories. Falstaff in the comedy is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled, victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women, who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his sensuality and insolence. No creature was ever set in a more ludicrous light or made more contemptible,--in a kindly, good-humoured way. The hysterical note of offended virtue is never sounded, nor is anywhere seen the averted face of shocked propriety. The two wives are bent on a frolic, and they will merrily punish this presumptuous sensualist--this silly, conceited, gross fellow, "old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails." If we knew no more of Falstaff than the comedy tells us of him we should by no means treasure him as we do now; but it is through the histories that we learn to know and appreciate him, and it is of the man portrayed there that we always unconsciously think when, in his humiliating discomfiture, we hear him declare that "wit may be made a Jack-a-lent when 'tis upon ill employment." For the Falstaff of the histories is a man of intellect, wisdom, and humour, thoroughly experienced in the ways of the world, fascinating in his drollery, human, companionable, infinitely amusing, and capable of turning all life to the favour of enjoyment and laughter--a man who is pa.s.sionate in the sentiment of comrades.h.i.+p, and who, with all his faults (and perhaps because of some of them, for faultless persons are too good for this world), inspires affection. "Would I were with him," cries the wretched Bardolph, "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in h.e.l.l." It is not Bardolph only whose heart has a warm corner for the memory of the poor old jovial sinner, wounded to death by the falling off of friends.h.i.+p--the implacable hardness of new-born virtue in the regenerated royal mind.

A comprehensive view of Falstaff--a view that includes the afflicting circ.u.mstances of his humiliation and of his forlorn and pathetic death not less than the roistering frolics and jocund mendacity of his life and character--is essential to a right appreciation of the meaning of him. Shakespeare is never a prosy moralist, but he constantly teaches you, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, that the moral law of the universe, working continually for goodness and not for evil, operates in an inexorable manner. Yet it is not of any moral consideration that the spectator of Falstaff upon the stage ever pauses to think. It is the humour of the fat knight that is perceived, and that alone. The thoughtful friends of Falstaff, however, see more in him than this, and especially they like not to think of him in a deplorable predicament.

The Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ is a man to laugh at; but he is not a man to inspire the comrade feeling, and still less is he a man to impress the intellect with the sense of a stalwart character and of illimitable jocund humour. Falstaff's friends--whose hearts are full of kindness for the old reprobate--have sat with him "in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire," and "have heard the chimes at midnight" in his society, and they know what a jovial companion he is--how abundant in knowledge of the world; how radiant with animal spirits; how completely inexhaustible in cheerfulness; how copious in comic invective; how incessantly nimble and ludicrous in wit and in waggery; how strange a compound of mind and sensuality, shrewdness and folly, fidelity and roguery, brazen mendacity, and comic selfishness! They do not like to think of him as merely a fat old fool, bamboozled by a pair of sprightly, not over-delicate women, far inferior to him in mental calibre, and made a laughing-stock for Fenton and sweet Anne Page, and the lads and la.s.sies of Windsor, and the chattering Welsh parson. "Have I lived," cried Falstaff, in the moment of his discomfiture, "to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?" He is a hard case, an inveterate sinner, as worthless as any man well could be, in the eyes of decorum and respectability; but those who know him well grow to be fond of him, even if they feel that they ought to be ashamed of it, and they do not quite forgive the poet for making him contemptible.

You can find many other figures that will make you laugh, but you can find no other figure that makes you laugh with such good reason. It seems incredible that Shakespeare, with his all-embracing mind and his perfect instinct of art, should deliberately have chosen to lessen his own masterpiece of humour. For Shakespeare rejoiced in Falstaff, even while he respected and recorded the inexorable justice of the moral law that decrees and eventually accomplishes his destruction. There is no one of his characters whose history he has traced with such minute elaboration. The conception is singularly ample. You may see Falstaff, as Shallow saw him, when he was a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk; you may see him all along the current of his mature years; his highway robberies on Gads.h.i.+ll; his bragging narrative to Prince Henry; his frolicsome, paternal, self-defensive lecture to the prince; his serio-comic a.s.sociation with the ragam.u.f.fin recruits at Coventry; his adroit escape from the sword of Hotspur; his mendacious self-glorification over the body of Harry Percy; his mishaps as a suitor to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page; his wonderfully humorous interviews with the Chief-Justice and with Prince John of Lancaster; his junketings with Justice Shallow in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, and his rebuff and consternation at his first and last meeting with King Henry V.; and finally you may see him, as Mrs. Quickly saw him, on his death-bed, when "'a cried out G.o.d! G.o.d! G.o.d! three or four times," and when "his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled o' green fields."

A good and faithful study of _King Henry IV._, and especially of the second part of that play, is essential for a right appreciation of Falstaff. Those scenes with the Chief-Justice are unmatched in literature. The knight stands royally forth in them, clothed with his entire panoply of agile intellect, robust humour, and boundless comic effrontery. But the arrogant and expeditious Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_--so richly freighted with rubicund sensuality, so abundant in comic loquacity, and so ludicrous in his sorry plights--is a much less complex person, and therefore he stands more level than the real Falstaff does with the average comprehension of mankind. The American stage, accordingly, by which more than by the printed book he has become known to our people, has usually given its preference to the Falstaff of the comedy. _The Merry Wives_ was first acted in New York on October 5, 1788 at the John Street theatre, with Harper as Falstaff. On April 1, 1807 it was produced at the old Park, and the Falstaff then was John E. Harwood. The same stage offered it again on January 16, 1829, with Hilson as Falstaff. A little later, about 1832, James H. Hackett took up the character of Falstaff, and from that time onward performances of _The Merry Wives_ occurred more frequently in different cities of America. Nor was the historical play neglected. On August 7, 1848 a remarkably fine production of the comedy was accomplished at the Astor Place Operahouse, New York, with Hackett as Falstaff, who never in his time was equalled in that character, and has not been equalled since. Another Falstaff, however, and a remarkably good one, appeared at Burton's theatre on August 24, 1850, in the person of Charles Ba.s.s. On March 14, 1853 _The Merry Wives_ was again given at Burton's theatre, and Burton himself played Falstaff, with characteristic humour; but Burton never acted the part as it stands in _Henry IV._ Hackett, who used both the history (Part I.) and the comedy, continued to act Falstaff almost to the end of his life and Hackett did not die till 1871. A distinguished representative of Falstaff in the early days of the American theatre--the days of the renowned Chestnut in Philadelphia--was William Warren (1767-1832), who came from England in 1796. In recent years the part has been acted by Benedict De Bar and by John Jack. The latest Falstaff in America was that embodied by Charles Fisher, who first a.s.sumed the character on November 19, 1872, at Daly's theatre, and whose performance was picturesque and humorous.

On the English stage the historical play of _Henry IV._ was exceedingly popular in Shakespeare's time. The first Falstaff, according to Malone, whom everybody has followed as to this point, was John Heminge (1555-1630). After him came John Lowin (1572-1654), who is thought to have acted the part in the presence of Charles I. His successor seems to have been Lacy, who died in 1681. Next came Cartwright, and in 1699 or 1700 the great Betterton (1635-1710) a.s.sumed the fat knight, acting him in both parts of the history and in the comedy. Genest records twenty-two revivals of the first part of _Henry IV._ upon the London stage, at five different theatres, between 1667 and 1826; fifteen revivals of the second part between 1720 and 1821; and sixteen revivals of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ between 1667 and 1811. Many English actors have played Falstaff since Betterton's time, an incomplete though sufficiently ample list of them comprising Estcourt, 1704; F. Bullock, 1713; J. Evans and J. Hall, 1715; Mills, 1716; Quin, "dignity and declamation," 1738; Berry, 1747; Love (whose true name was James Dance), 1762; Shuter, 1774; John Henderson, one of the greatest actors that ever lived, 1774; Mrs. Webb (once only), 1776; Ryder, 1786; Palmer, 1788; King, 1792; Fawcett, 1795; Stephen Kemble, who was so fat that he could play it without stuffing or bladder, 1802; Blissett, 1803; George Frederick Cooke, 1804; Bartley, 1812; Charles Kemble, 1824; Dowton, 1824; Elliston, 1826; and Samuel Phelps, 1846. The latest representative of Falstaff in England was H. Beerbohm-Tree, who, although a man of slender figure, contrived to simulate corpulence, and who manifested in his acting a fine instinct as to the meaning of the character and considerable resources of art in its expression, although the predominant individuality and the copious luxuriance of Falstaff's rosy and juicy humour were not within his reach. Upon the American stage the part is practically disused; and this is a pity, seeing that a source of great enjoyment and one of the most suggestive and fruitful topics that exist in a.s.sociation with the study of human nature are thus in a great degree sequestered from the public mind. Still it is better to have no Falstaff on the stage than to have it enc.u.mbered with a bad one; and certainly for the peculiar and exacting play of _Henry IV._ there are now no actors left: at least they are not visible in America.