XII.
JOHN McCULLOUGH IN SEVERAL CHARACTERS.
There is no greater gratification to the intellect than the sense of power and completeness in itself or the perception of power and completeness in others. Those attributes were in John McCullough's acting and were at the heart of its charm. His repertory consisted of thirty characters, but probably the most imposing and affecting of his embodiments was Virginius. The massive grandeur of adequacy in that performance was a great excellence. The rugged, weather-beaten plainness of it was full of authority and did not in the least detract from its poetic purity and ideal grace. The simplicity of it was like the lovely innocence that shines through the ingenuous eyes of childhood, while its majesty was like the sheen of white marble in the sunlight. It was a very high, serious, noble work; yet,—although, to his immeasurable credit, the actor never tried to apply a "natural" treatment to artificial conditions or to speak blank verse in a colloquial manner,—it was made sweetly human by a delicate play of humour in the earlier scenes, and by a deep glow of paternal tenderness that suffused every part of it and created an almost painful sense of sincerity. Common life was not made commonplace life by McCullough, nor blank verse depressed to the level of prose. The intention to be real—the intention to love, suffer, feel, act, defend, and avenge, as a man of actual life would do—was obvious enough, through its harmonious fulfilment; yet the realism was shorn of all triteness, all animal excess, all of those ordinary attributes which are right in nature, and wrong because obstructive in the art that is nature's interpretation.
Just as the true landscape is the harmonious blending of selected natural effects, so the true dramatic embodiment is the crystallization of selected attributes in any given type of human nature, shown in selected phases of natural condition. McCullough did not present Virginius brushing his hair or paying Virginia's school-bills; yet he suggested him, clearly and beautifully, in the sweet domestic repose and paternal benignity of his usual life—making thus a background of loveliness, on which to throw, in lines of living light, the terrible image of his agonising sacrifice. And when the inevitable moment came for his dread act of righteous slaughter it was the moral grandeur, the heart-breaking paternal agony, and the overwhelming pathos of the deed that his art diffused—not the "gashed stab," the blood, the physical convulsion, the revolting animal shock. Neither was there druling, or dirt, or physical immodesty, or any other attribute of that class of the natural concomitants of insanity, in the subsequent delirium.
A perfect and holy love is, in one aspect of it, a sadder thing to see than the profoundest grief. Misery, at its worst, is at least final: and for that there is the relief of death. But love, in its sacred exaltation,—the love of the parent for the child,—is so fair a mark for affliction that one can hardly view it without a shudder of apprehensive dread. That sort of love was personified in McCullough's embodiment of Virginius, and that same nameless thrill of fear was imparted by its presence,—even before the tragedian, with an exquisite intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances of the "natural" school; and all the time it was maintained at the lofty level of classic grace. It would be impossible to overstate the excellence of all that McCullough did and said, in the forum scene—the noble severity of the poise, the grace of the outlines, the terrible intensity of the mood, the heartrending play of the emotions, the overwhelming delirium of the climax. Throughout the subsequent most difficult portraiture of shattered reason the actor never, for an instant, lost his steadfast grasp upon sympathy and inspiration. Every heart knew the presence of a nature that could feel all that Virginius felt and suffer and act all that Virginius suffered and acted; and, beyond this, in his wonderful investiture of the mad scenes with the alternate vacancy and lamentable and forlorn anguish of a special kind of insanity, every judge of the dramatic art recognised the governing touch of a splendid intellect, imperial over all its resources and instruments of art.
Virginius as embodied by McCullough was a man of noble and refined nature; lovely in life; cruelly driven into madness; victorious over dishonour, by a deed of terrible heroism; triumphant over crime, even in forlorn and pitiable dethronement and ruin; and, finally, released by the celestial mercy of death. And this was shown by a poetic method so absolute that Virginius, while made an actual man to every human heart, was kept a hero to the universal imagination, whether of scholar or peasant, and a white ideal of manly purity and grace to that great faculty of taste which is the umpire and arbiter of the human mind.
The sustained poetic exaltation of that embodiment, its unity as a grand and sympathetic personage, and its exquisite simplicity were the qualities that gave it vitality in popular interest, and through those it will have permanence in theatrical history. There were many subtle beauties in it. The illimitable tenderness, back of the sweet dignity, in the betrothal of Virginia to Icilius; the dim, transitory, evanescent touch of presentiment, in the forecasting of the festival joys that are to succeed the war; the self-abnegation and simple homeliness of grief for the dead Dentatus; the alternate shock of freezing terror and cry of joy, in the camp scene—closing with that potent repression and thrilling outburst, "Prudence, but no patience!"—a situation and words that call at once for splendid manliness of self-command and an ominous and savage vehemence; the glad, saving, comforting cry to Virginia, "Is she here?"—that cry which never failed to precipitate a gush of joyous tears; the rapt preoccupation and the exquisite music of voice with which he said, "I never saw thee look so like thy mother, in all my life"; the majesty of his demeanour in the forum; the look that saw the knife; the mute parting glance at Servia; the accents of broken reason, but unbroken and everlasting love, that called upon the name of the poor murdered Virginia; and then the last low wail of the dying father, conscious and happy in the great boon of death—those, as McCullough gave them, were points of impressive beauty, invested with the ever-varying light and shadow of a delicate artistic treatment, and all the while animated with passionate sincerity. The perfect finish of the performance, indeed, was little less than marvellous, when viewed with reference to the ever-increasing volume of power and the evident reality of afflicting emotion with which the part was carried. If acting ever could do good the acting of McCullough did. If ever dramatic art concerns the public welfare it is when such an ideal of manliness and heroism is presented in such an image of nobility.
In Lear and in Othello,—as in Virginius,—the predominant quality of McCullough's acting was a profound and beautiful sincerity. His splendidly self-poised nature—a solid rock of truth, which enabled him, through years of patient toil, to hold a steadfast course over all the obstacles that oppose and amid all the chatter that assails a man who is trying to accomplish anything grand and noble in art—bore him bravely up in those great characters, and made him, in each of them, a stately type of the nobility of the human soul. As the Moor, his performance was well-nigh perfect. There was something a little fantastic, indeed, in the facial style that he used; and that blemish was enhanced by the display of a wild beast's head on the back of one of Othello's robes. The tendency of that sort of ornamentation—however consonant it may be deemed with the barbaric element in the Moor—is to suggest him as heedful of appearances, and thus to distract regard from his experience to his accessories. But the spirit was true. Simplicity, urged almost to the extreme of barrenness, would not be out of place in Othello, and McCullough, in his treatment of the part, testified to his practical appreciation of that truth. His ideal of Othello combined manly tenderness, spontaneous magnanimity, and trusting devotion, yet withal a volcanic ground-swell of passion, that early and clearly displayed itself as capable of delirium and ungovernable tempest. His method had the calm movement of a summer cloud, in every act and word by which this was shown. For intensity and for immediate, adequate, large, and overwhelming response of action to emotion, that performance has not been surpassed. There were points in it, though, at which the massive serenity of the actor's temperament now and then deadened the glow of feeling and depressed him to undue calmness; he sometimes recovered too suddenly and fully from a tempest of emotion—as at the agonising appeal to Iago, "Give me a living reason she's disloyal"; and he was not enough delirious in the speech about the sybil and the handkerchief. On the other hand, once yielded to the spell of desecrated feeling, his mood and his expression of it were immeasurably pathetic and noble. Those two great ebullitions of despair, "O, now forever," and "Had it pleased heaven," could not be spoken in a manner more absolutely heart-broken or more beautifully simple than the manner that was used by him. In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of soft, romantic affection—always spiritualised, never sensual—that his deep and loving sincerity diffused throughout the work, was shown the grand unity of the embodiment; a unity based on the simple passion of love. To hear that actor say the one supreme line to Iago, "I am bound to thee forever," was to know that he understood and felt the meaning of the character, to its minutest fibre and its profoundest depth.
There were touches of fresh and aptly illustrative "business" in the encounter of Othello and Iago, in the great scene of the third act. The gasping struggles of Iago heightened the effect of the Moor's fury, and the quickly suppressed impulse and yell of rage with which he finally bounded away made an admirable effect of nature. In the last scene McCullough rounded his performance with a solemn act of sacrifice. There was nothing animal, nothing barbaric, nothing insane, in the slaughter of Desdemona. It was done in an ecstasy of justice, and the atmosphere that surrounded the deed was that of awe and not of horror.
For the character of King Lear McCullough possessed the imposing stature, the natural majesty, the great reach of voice, and the human tenderness that are its basis and equipment. No actor of Lear can ever satisfy a sympathetic lover of the part unless he possesses a greatly affectionate heart, a fiery spirit, and,—albeit the intellect must be shown in ruins,—a regal mind. Within that grand and lamentable image of shattered royalty the man must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in mind—already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution; not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him with solicitude and pain. He is not yet decrepit but he will soon break; and the spectator loves him and is sorry for him and would avert the destiny of woe that is darkly foreshadowed in his condition. McCullough gave the invectives—as they ought to be given—with the impetuous rush and wild fury of the avalanche; and yet they were felt to come out of agony as well as out of passion. The pathos of those tremendous passages is in their chaotic disproportion; in their lawlessness and lack of government; in the evident helplessness of the poor old man who hurls them forth from a breaking heart and a distracted mind. He loves, and he loathes himself for loving: every fibre of his nature is in horrified revolt against such lack of reverence, gratitude, and affection toward such a monarch and such a father as he knows himself to have been. The feeling that McCullough poured through those moments of splendid yet pitiable frenzy was overwhelming in its intense glow and in its towering and incessant volume. There was remarkable subtlety, also, in the manner in which that feeling was tempered. In Lear's meeting with Goneril after the curse you saw at once the broken condition of an aged, infirm, and mentally disordered man, who had already forgotten his own terrible words. "We'll no more meet, no more see one another" is a line to which McCullough gave its full eloquence of abject mournfulness and forlorn desolation. Other denotements of subtlety were seen in his sad preoccupation with memories of the lost Cordelia, while talking with the Fool. "I did her wrong" was never more tenderly spoken than by him. They are only four little words; but they carry the crushing weight of eternal and hopeless remorse. It was in this region of delicate, imaginative touch that McCullough's dramatic art was especially puissant. He was the first actor of Lear to discriminate between the agony of a man while going mad and the careless, volatile, fantastic condition—afflicting to witness, but no longer agonising to the lunatic himself—of a man who has actually lapsed into madness. Edwin Forrest—whose Lear is much extolled, often by persons who, evidently, never saw it—much as he did with the part, never even faintly suggested such a discrimination as that.
To one altitude of Lear's condition it is probably impossible for dramatic art to rise—the mood of divine philosophy, warmed with human tenderness, in which the dazed but semi-conscious vicegerent of heaven moralises over human life. There is a grandeur in that conception so vast that nothing short of the rarest inspiration of genius can rise to it. The deficiences of McCullough's Lear were found in the analysis of that part of the performance. He had the heart of Lear, the royalty, the breadth; but not all of either the exalted intellect, the sorrow-laden experience, or the imagination—so gorgeous in its disorder, so infinitely pathetic in its misery.
His performance of Lear signally exemplified, through every phase of passion, that temperance which should give it smoothness. The treatment of the curse scene, in particular, was extraordinarily beautiful for the low, sweet, and tender melody of the voice, broken only now and then—and rightly broken—with the harsh accents of wrath. Gentleness never accomplished more, as to taste and pathos, than in McCullough's utterance of "I gave you all," and "I'll go with you." The rallying of the broken spirit after that, and the terrific outburst, "I'll not weep," had an appalling effect. The recognition of Cordelia was simply tender, and the death scene lovely in pathos and solemn and affecting in tragic climax.
Throughout Othello and King Lear McCullough's powers were seen to be curbed and guided, not by a cold and formal design but by a grave and sweet gentleness of mind, always a part of his nature, but more and more developed by the stress of experience, by the reactionary subduing influence of noble success, and by the definite consciousness of power. He found no difficulty in portraying the misery of Othello and of Lear, because this is a form of misery that flows out of laceration of the heart, and not from the more subtle wounds that are inflicted upon the spirit through the imagination. There was no brooding over the awful mysteries of the universe, nor any of that corroding, haunted gloom that comes of an over-spiritualised state of suffering, longing, questioning, doubting humanity. Above all things else Othello and Lear are human; and the human heart, above all things else, was the domain of that actor.
The character of Coriolanus, though high and noble, is quite as likely to inspire resentment as to awaken sympathy. It contains many elements and all of them are good; but chiefly it typifies the pride of intellect. This, in itself a natural feeling and a virtuous quality, practically becomes a vice when it is not tempered with charity for ignorance, weakness, and the lower orders of mind. In the character of Coriolanus it is not so tempered, and therefore it vitiates his greatness and leads to his destruction. Much, of course, can be urged in his defence. He is a man of spotless honour, unswerving integrity, dauntless courage, simple mind, straightforward conduct, and magnanimous disposition. He is always ready to brave the perils of battle for the service of his country. He constantly does great deeds—and would continue constantly to do them—for their own sake and in a spirit of total indifference alike to praises and rewards. He exists in the consciousness of being great and has no life in the opinions of other persons. He dwells in "the cedar's top" and "dallies with the wind and scorns the sun." He knows and he despises with active and immitigable contempt the shallowness and fickleness of the multitude. He is of an icy purity, physical as well as mental, and his nerves tingle with disgust of the personal uncleanliness of the mob. "Bid them wash their faces," he says—when urged to ask the suffrages of the people—"and keep their teeth clean." "He rewards his deeds with doing them," says his fellow-soldier Cominius, "and looks upon things precious as the common muck of the world." His aristocracy does not sit in a corner, deedless and meritless, brooding over a transmitted name and sucking the orange of empty self-conceit: it is the aristocracy of achievement and of nature—the solid superiority of having done the brightest and best deeds that could be done in his time and of being the greatest man of his generation. It is as if a Washington, having made and saved a nation, were to spurn it from him with his foot, in lofty and by no means groundless contempt for the ignorance, pettiness, meanness, and filth of mankind. The story of Coriolanus, as it occurs in Plutarch, is thought to be fabulous, but it is very far from being fabulous as it stands transfigured in the stately, eloquent tragedy of Shakespeare. The character and the experience are indubitably representative. It was some modified form of the condition thus shown that resulted in the treason and subsequent ruin of Benedict Arnold. Pride of intellect largely dominated the career of Aaron Burr. More than one great thinker has split on that rock, and gone to pieces in the surges of popular resentment. "No man," said Dr. Chapin, in his discourse over the coffin of Horace Greeley, "can lift himself above himself." He who repudiates the humanity of which he is a part will inevitably come to sorrow and ruin. It is perfectly true that no intellectual person should in the least depend upon the opinions of others—which, in the nature of things, exist in all stages of immaturity, mutability, and error—but should aim to do the greatest deeds and should find reward in doing them: yet always the right mood toward humanity is gentleness and not scorn. "Thou, my father," said Matthew Arnold, in his tribute to one of the best men of the century, "wouldst not be saved alone." To enlighten the ignorant, to raise the weak, to pity the frail, to disregard the meanness, ingratitude, misapprehension, dulness, and petty malice of the lower orders of humanity—that is the wisdom of the wise; and that is accordant with the moral law of the universe, from the operation of which no man escapes. To study, in Shakespeare, the story of Coriolanus is to observe the violation of that law and the consequent retribution.
"Battles, and the breath
Of stormy war and violent death"
fill up the first part of the tragedy as it stands in Shakespeare, and that portion is also much diversified with abrupt changes of scene; so that it has been found expedient to alter the piece, with a view to its more practical adaptation to the stage. While however it is not acted in strict accordance with Shakespeare its essential parts are retained and represented. Many new lines, though, occur toward the close. McCullough used the version that was used by Forrest, who followed in the footsteps of Cooper, the elder Vandenhoff, and James R. Anderson. There is, perhaps, an excess of foreground—a superfluity of fights and processions—by way of preparing for the ordeal through which the character of Coriolanus is to be displayed. Yet when Hecuba at last is reached the interest of the situation makes itself felt with force. The massive presence and stalwart declamation of Edwin Forrest made him superb in this character; but the embodiment of Coriolanus by McCullough, while equal to its predecessor in physical majesty, was superior to it in intellectual haughtiness and in refinement. An actor's treatment of the character must, unavoidably, follow the large, broad style of the historical painter. There is scant opportunity afforded in any of the scenes allotted to Coriolanus for fine touches and delicate shading. During much of the action the spectator is aware only of an imperial figure that moves with a mountainous grace through the fleeting rabble of Roman plebeians and Volscians, dreadful in war, loftily calm in peace, irradiating the conscious superiority of power, dignity, worth, and honourable renown. McCullough filled that aspect of the part as if he had been born for it. His movements had the splendid repose not merely of great strength but of intellectual poise and native mental supremacy. The "I must be found" air of Othello was again displayed, in ripe perfection, through the Roman toga. His declamation was as fluent and as massively graceful as his demeanour. If this actor had not the sonorous, clarion voice of John Kemble, he yet certainly suggested the tradition of the stately port and dominating step of that great master of the dramatic art. He looked Coriolanus, to the life. More of poetic freedom might have been wished, in the decorative treatment of the person—a touch of wildness in the hair, a tinge of imaginative exaltation in the countenance, an air of mischance in the gashes of combat. Still the embodiment was correct in its superficial conventionality; and it certainly possessed affecting grandeur. Whenever there was opportunity for fine treatment, moreover, the actor seized and filled it, with the easy grace of unerring intuition and spontaneity. The delicacy of vocalism, the movement, the tone of sentiment, and the manliness of condition—the royal fibre of a great mind—in the act of withdrawal from the senate, was right and beautiful. It is difficult not to over-emphasise the physical symbols of mental condition, in the street scene with "the voices"; but there again the actor denoted a fine spiritual instinct. To a situation like that of the banishment he proved easily equal: indeed, he gave that magnificent outburst of scorn with tremendous power: but it was in the pathetic scene with Volumnia and Virgilia that he reached the summit of the Shakespearean conception. The deep heart as well as the imperial intellect of Coriolanus must then speak. It is, for the distracted son, a moment of agonised and pathetic conflict: for McCullough it was a moment of perfect adequacy and consummate success. The stormy utterance of revolted pride and furious disgust, in the denial of Volumnia's request—the tempestuous outburst, "I will not do it"—made as wild, fiery, and fine a moment in tragic acting as could be imagined; but the climax was attained in the pathetic cry—
"The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at."