II.
A round of applause greeted the rise of the curtain upon the first scene of “The Bells.” The audience thus testified their desire to be kindly; but, as the first part of the story was told, there was a certain impatience even in their recognition of the artistic simplicity of the scene. “The Bells” opens more like a novel than a play; and yet the suggestiveness of the narrative at the table, as the topers chat and drink, is singularly dramatic. On this first night the play seemed to drag, and the audience were on the tiptoe of expectation. Those who were comfortably seated were anxious for the appearance of Irving; those who poured in to fill vacant seats at the back, and the hundreds who pushed in to stand behind them, created an uncomfortable sensation of disquiet. Had the Star been a London theatre, the patience of the people who were seated would have been so seriously taxed that they would hardly have permitted the play to proceed until order had been secured in all parts of the house.
At last the door of the burgomaster’s homelike inn is flung open, and Irving stands there in his snow-sprinkled furs, his right hand raised above his head in the action of greeting his family, his left hand grasping his whip. His entrance was never more natural, never more picturesque. The audience hardly heard his opening words,—“It’s I!” They greeted him with thunders of applause, and shouts of welcome. He presently stepped forward from the door. Those who knew him would not fail to detect an effort to control his emotions, when he bowed his acknowledgments of a greeting as spontaneous as it was hearty. I had seen him in his dressing-room only a short time before. He was anxious, but firm as a rock; not in doubt of his own powers, but impressed, as any man might be, under similar circumstances, with the knowledge of how high the expectations of the people had been raised; how great the task of even approaching the standard of their excited hopes.
And now that the audience, touched by the artistic novelty of his appearance, and moved by their sentiments of hospitality, had given vent to their feelings, they settled down to allow the actor, of whose methods they had heard so much, to conquer their favorable opinion if he could. Despite the prejudices of some, and the annoyance of those who had been victimized by the speculators, auditors were willing to be captured,—nay, were desirous, if they could honestly do so, to endorse the verdict of their cousins of England, as to the place which Henry Irving holds in dramatic art.
“The Bells” is a weird play. Its lines are simple; it never halts. Mathias is an inn-keeper. He murders his guest, a Polish Jew, murders him on the highway for his gold, and is forever haunted by his crime. The jangle of the sleigh-bells, as the Jew’s horse gallops away after its master’s death, is continually in the assassin’s ears. Their sad music trickles through the story like the ripple of a rising stream through stubble-fields in autumn. It sweeps over the dramatic narrative like the sighing of the wind in “chill October.” Remorse takes possession of the criminal; he dreams he is being tried for his life.
This scene affords special opportunities for illustrating Irving’s dramatic magnetism. The judicial court of his dreamland forces him to submit to the operations of a mesmerist. Under this influence he makes confession of his crime by reënacting it. Nothing more weirdly suggestive can be imagined. Before an audience as breathless as the court, the actor went through the pantomime of stopping the Jew’s horse, cutting down the Jew with an axe, plundering the body and thrusting it into a lime-kiln. Then, convicted and condemned, the murderer dies under the violent shock to his nerves of this retributive force of imagination,—dies while the church-bells are ringing for his daughter’s marriage,—his last agonizing words, “Take the rope from my throat!”
Only a daring artist would undertake such a part; only a great one could succeed in it. Most of the second and last acts is a monologue; and, in a country like America, which is accustomed to rapidity of thought and action, Irving was courageous in risking the result of so serious a strain upon the mind of a highly strung audience. The experiment, however, was entirely a triumph, notwithstanding the previously-mentioned discomforts attending an overcrowded house, and the rain that stormed without.