From that moment the performance is one long triumph. Clytemnestra (Madame Lerou) comes with her suite to receive the king (Mounet-Sully), the conqueror! I never realized before all the perfection that training can give the speaking voice. Each syllable seemed to ring out with a bell-like clearness. As she gradually rose in the last act to the scene with Orestes, I understood the use of the great wall behind the actors. It increased the power of the voices and lent them a sonority difficult to believe. The effect was overwhelming when, unable to escape death, Clytemnestra cries out her horrible imprecations.
Mounet-Sully surpassed himself. Paul Mounet gave us the complete illusion of a monster thirsting for blood, even his mother’s! When striking her as she struck his father, he answers her despairing query, “Thou wouldst not slay thy mother?” “Woman, thou hast ceased to be a mother!” Dudlay (as Cassandra) reaches a splendid climax when she prophesies the misfortune hanging over her family, which she is powerless to avert.
It is impossible in feeble prose to give any idea of the impression those lines produce in the stupendous theatre, packed to its utmost limits—the wild night, with a storm in the air, a stage which seems like a clearing in some forest inhabited by Titans, the terrible tragedy of Æschylus following the graceful fête of Apollo.
After the unavoidable confusion at the beginning, the vast audience listen in profound silence to an expression of pure art. They are no longer actors we hear, but demi-gods. With voices of the storm, possessed by some divine afflatus, thundering out verses of fire—carried out of themselves in a whirlwind of passion, like antique prophets and Sibyls foretelling the misfortunes of the world!
That night will remain immutably fixed in my memory, if I live to be as old as the theatre itself. We were so moved, my companion and I, and had seen the crowd so moved, that fearing to efface the impression if we returned the second night to see Antigone, we came quietly away, pondering over it all, and realizing once again that a thing of beauty is a source of eternal delight.
CHAPTER 26—Pre-palatial Newport
The historic Ocean House of Newport is a ruin. Flames have laid low the unsightly structure that was at one time the best-known hotel in America. Its fifty-odd years of existence, as well as its day, are over. Having served a purpose, it has departed, together with the generation and habits of life that produced it, into the limbo where old houses, old customs, and superannuated ideas survive,—the memory of the few who like to recall other days and wander from time to time in a reconstructed past.
There was a certain appropriateness in the manner of its taking off. The proud old structure had doubtless heard projects of rebuilding discussed by its owners (who for some years had been threatening to tear it down); wounded doubtless by unflattering truths, the hotel decided that if its days were numbered, an exit worthy of a leading rôle was at least possible. “Pull me down, indeed! That is all very well for ordinary hostleries, but from an establishment of my pretensions, that has received the aristocracy of the country, and countless foreign swells, something more is expected!”
So it turned the matter over and debated within its shaky old brain (Mrs. Skewton fashion) what would be the most becoming and effective way of retiring from the social whirl. Balls have been overdone; people are no longer tempted by receptions; a banquet was out of the question. Suddenly the wily building hit on an idea. “I’ll give them a feu d’artifice. There hasn’t been a first-class fire here since I burned myself down fifty-three years ago! That kind of entertainment hasn’t been run into the ground like everything else in these degenerate days! I’ll do it in the best and most complete way, and give Newport something to talk about, whenever my name shall be mentioned in the future!”
Daudet, in his L’Immortel, shows us how some people are born lucky. His “Loisel of the Institute,” although an insignificant and commonplace man, succeeded all through life in keeping himself before the public, and getting talked about as a celebrity. He even arranged (to the disgust and envy of his rivals) to die during a week when no event of importance was occupying public attention. In consequence, reporters, being short of “copy,” owing to a dearth of murders and “first nights,” seized on this demise and made his funeral an event.