A great actor,—a true master of his art, certainly stands very high. What knowledge and power he must have! How much genius must he unite with corporeal grace and address!—how much creative power, with the most perfect knowledge of wearisome ‘routine!’
This evening, for the first time since my residence here, I saw Macbeth,—perhaps the most sublime and perfect of Shakspeare’s tragedies. Macready, who has lately returned from America, played the part admirably. The passages in which he appeared to me peculiarly true and powerful, were, first, the night-scene in which he comes on the stage after the murder of Duncan, with the bloody dagger, and tells his wife that he has done the deed. He carried on the whole conversation in a low voice, as the nature of the incident requires;—like a whisper in the dark,—yet so distinctly, and with such a fearful expression, that all the terrors of night and crime pass with the sound into the hearer’s very soul. Not less excellent was the difficult part with Banquo’s ghost. The fine passage—
“What man dare, I dare.
Approach, then, like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm’d rhinoceros, or Hyrcanian tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble. Or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword;
If trembling I inhibit, then protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, terrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence!” &c.
with great judgment he began with all the vehemence of desperation; then, overcome by terror, dropped his voice lower and lower, till the last words were tremulous and inarticulate. Then, uttering a subdued cry of mortal horror, he suddenly cast his mantle over his face and sank back half-lifeless on his seat. He thus produced the most apalling effect. As man, you felt tremblingly with him, that our most daring courage can oppose nothing to the terrors of another world;—you saw no trace of the stage-hero, who troubles himself little about nature; and playing only to produce effect on the galleries, seeks his highest triumph in an ascending scale of noise and fury. Macready was admirable, too, in the last act; in which conscience and fear are equally deadened and exhausted, and rigid apathy has taken the place of both; when the last judgment breaks over the head of the sinner in three rapidly succeeding strokes,—the death of the Queen, the fulfilment of the delusive predictions of the witches, and Macduff’s terrific declaration that he is not born of woman.
What had previously tortured Macbeth’s spirit—had made him murmer at his condition, or struggle against the goadings of his conscience,—can now only strike him with momentary terror, like a lightning flash. He is weary of himself and of existence; and fighting, as he says in bitter scorn, ‘bear-like,’ he falls at length, a great criminal—but withal a king and a hero.
Equally masterly was the combat with Macduff, in which inferior actors commonly fail;—nothing hurried, yet all the fire, nay, all the horror of the end,—of the final rage and despair.
I shall never forget the ludicrous effect of this scene at the first performance of Spiker’s translation at Berlin. Macbeth and his antagonist set upon each other in such a manner, that, without intending it, they got behind the scenes before their dialogue was at an end; whence the words “Hold—enough!” (what went before them being inaudible,) sounded as if Macbeth was run down and had cried, (holding out his sword and deprecating any further fighting,) “Leave off—hold—enough!”
Lady Macbeth, though played by a second-rate actress,—for, alas! since the departure of Mrs. Siddons and Miss O’Neil there is no first rate—pleased me better in her feeble delineation of the character, than many would-be-great ‘artistes’ of our fatherland, whose affected manner is suited to no single character in Shakspeare.
I do not, however, entirely participate in Tieck’s well-known view of this character. I would fain go still deeper into it. Scarcely any man understands how the love of a woman sees every thing solely as it regards or affects the beloved object; and thence, for a time at least, knows virtue or vice only with relation to him.
Lady Macbeth, represented as a furious Megæra who uses her husband only as an instrument of her own ambition, is wanting in all inward truth, and, still more, in all interest. Such a woman would be incapable of that profound feeling of her own crime and misery so fearfully expressed in the sleeping scene; it is only in the presence of her husband, and in order to give him courage, that she always seems the stronger; that she shows neither fear nor remorse; that she jests at them in him, and seeks to deafen herself to their voice in her own heart.