XXIII.
SALVINI AS KING SAUL AND KING LEAR.
Salvini was grander and finer in King Saul than in any other embodiment that he presented. He seized the idea wholly, and he executed it with affluent power. He brought to the part every attribute necessary to its grandeur of form and its afflicting sympathy of spirit. His towering physique presented, with impressive accuracy, the Hebrew monarch, chosen of God, who was "lifted a head and shoulders above the people." His tremulous sensibility, his knowledge of suffering, his skill in depicting it, his great resources of voice, his vigour and fineness of action, his exceptional commingling of largeness and gentleness—all these attributes combined in that performance, to give magnificent reality to one of the most sublime conceptions in literature. By his personation of Saul Salvini added a new and an immortal figure to the stage pantheon of kings and heroes.
Alfieri's tragedy of Saul was written in 1782-83, when the haughty, impetuous, and passionate poet was thirty-four years old, and at the suggestion of the Countess of Albany, whom he loved. He had suffered a bereavement at the time, and he was in deep grief. The Countess tried to console him by reading the Bible, and when they came upon the narrative of Saul the idea of the tragedy was struck out between them. The work was written with vigorous impulse and the author has left, in his autobiography, the remark that none of his tragedies cost him so little labour. Saul is in five acts and it contains 1567 lines—of that Italian versi sciolti which inadequately corresponds to the blank verse of the English language. The scene is laid in the camp of Saul's army. Six persons are introduced, namely, Saul, Jonathan, David, Michel, Abner, and Achimelech. The time supposed to be occupied by the action—or rather, by the suffering—of the piece is a single day, the last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act second presents the distracted monarch, who knows that God has forsaken him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man, and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David—whom he at once loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence of Israel—so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease; the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent recurrence, before his mind's eye, of the shade of the dead prophet; and finally his suicidal death. It is, in form, a classical tragedy, massive, grand, and majestically simple; and it blazes from end to end with the fire of a sublime imagination.
Ardent lovers of Italian literature are fond of ranking Saul with Lear. The claim is natural but it is not valid. In Lear—not to speak of its profound revelations of universal human nature and its vast philosophy of human life—there is a tremendous scope of action, through which mental condition and experience are dramatically revealed; and there is the deepest deep of pathos, because the highest height of afflicted goodness. In Saul there is simply—upon a limited canvas, without adjuncts, without the suggestion of resources, without the relief of even mournful humour, and with a narrative rather than a dramatic background—the portraiture of a condition; and, because the man displayed is neither so noble nor so human, the pathos surcharging the work is neither so harrowing nor so tender. Yet the two works are akin in majesty of ideal, in the terrible topic of mental disease that shatters a king, and in the atmosphere of desolation that trails after them like a funeral pall; and it is not a wonder that Alfieri's Saul should be deemed the greatest tragedy ever originated in the Italian language. It attains a superb height, for it keeps an equal pace with the severe simplicity of the Bible narrative on which it is founded. It depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, a kind heart, and a royal and regally poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit world and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state. Awe and terror surround that august sufferer, and make him both holy and dreadful. In his person and his condition, as those are visible to the imaginative mind, he combined elements that irresistibly impress and thrill. He is of vast physical stature, that time has not bent, and of great beauty of face, that griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is a valiant and sanguinary warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss of misery—a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the Bible and of Alfieri's tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini embodied. It was a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor presented, and no one could look upon it without being awed and chastened.
Salvini's embodiment of King Lear was a remarkable manifestation of physical resources and of professional skill. The lofty stature, the ample and resonant voice, the copious animal excitement, the fluent elocution and the vigorous, picturesque, and often melodramatic movements, gestures, and poses of Salvini united to animate and embellish a personality such as would naturally absorb attention and diffuse excitement. Every artist, however, moves within certain specific and positive limitations—spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet, was unspiritual—giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative, obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the Moor that he interpreted were physical; the loftiest heights that he reached were terror and distracted grief; but he worked with a pictorial method and a magnetic vigour that enthralled the feelings even when they did not command the judgment.
His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations. During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric, disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and especially destitute of inherent personal fascination—of the suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin—but he has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent, overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself" were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia—as in "No more of that, I have noted it well"—and he gave, at the beginning, no intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first mad scene.
Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was crude. He put the king behind a table, in the first scene—which had the effect of preparation for a lecture; and it pleased him to speak the storm speech away back at the upper entrance, with his body almost wholly concealed behind painted crags. With all its moments of power and of tenderness the embodiment was neither royal, lovable, nor great. It might be a good Italian Lear: it was not the Lear of Shakespeare. Salvini was particularly out of the character in the curse scene and in the frantic parting from the two daughters, because there the quality of the man, behind the action, seemed especially common. The action, though, was theatrical and had its due effect.