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 passes 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 Cockburnspath, that might well have suggested to him the quicksand and the final catastrophe. I saw it when the morning sun was shining 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 associations 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 passion 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 passive 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 assigned 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 fictitious names, invented fresh circumstances, 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 surpassed, 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 passion 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 chastisement 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 illustration 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 nobleness, which is always characteristic of the experience of this passion 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 passion. 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 ashore, 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 passionate, sombre, and lamentable. The first and second acts of it pass 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 noble 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 astonishing 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 circumstances his sadness has become embittered. He takes life thoughtfully and with passionate earnestness. He is a noble 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 investiture 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 Vandyke'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 sunshine 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 assumes 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 God forgive you, then, and pity me—
If God 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.