Literary and Social Essays

by George William Curtis

When she speaks, the low, thrilling, distinct voice seems to proceed rather from her eyes than her mouth. It has a wan sound, if we may say so. It is the very tone you would have predicted as coming from that form, like the unearthly music which accompanies the speech of the Commendatore's statue in "Don Giovanni". That appearance and that voice are the key of the whole performance. Before she has spoken, you are filled with the spirit of an age infinitely remote, and only related to human sympathy now by the grandeur of suffering. The rest merely confirms that impression. The whole is simple and intense. It is conceived and fulfilled in the purest sense of Greek art.

Of the early career and later life of Rachel such romantic stories are told and believed that only to see the heroine of her own life would be attraction enough to draw the world to Paris. Dr. Vernon, in his Mémoires d'un Bourgeois, has described her earliest appearance upon the Boulevards—her studies, her trials, and her triumph. That triumph has been unequalled in stage annals for enthusiasm and permanence. Other actors have achieved single successes as brilliant; but no other has held for so long the most fickle and fastidious nation thrall to her powers; owning no rival near the throne, and ruling with a sway whose splendor was only surpassed by its sternness.

For Rachel has never sought to ally her genius to goodness, and has rather despised than courted the aid of noble character. Not a lady by birth or breeding, she is reported to have surpassed Messalina in debauchery and Semiramis in luxury. Paris teems with tales of her private life, which, while they are undoubtedly exaggerated, yet serve to show the kind of impression her career has produced. Those modern Sybarites, the princes and nobles of Russia, are the heroes of her private romances; and her sumptuous apartments, if not a Tour de Nesle, are at least a bower of Rosamond.

As if to show the independent superiority of her art, she has been willing to appear, or she really is, avaricious, mean, jealous, passionate, false; and then, by her prodigious power, she has swayed the public that so judged her as the wind tosses a leaf. There has, alas, been disdain in her superiority. Perhaps Paris has found something fascinating in her very contempt, as in the Mémoires du Diable the heroine confesses that she loved the ferocity of her lover. Nor is it a traditional fame that she has enjoyed; but whenever Rachel plays, the theatre is crowded, and the terror and the tears are what they were when she began.

Rachel is the greatest of merely dramatic artists. Others are more beautiful; others are more stately and imposing; others have been fitted by external gifts of nature to personify characters of very marked features; others are more graceful and lovely and winning; most others mingle their own personality with the characters they assume, but Rachel has this final evidence of genius, that she is always superior to what she does; her mind presides over her own performances. It is the perfection of art. In describing this peculiar supremacy of genius, a scholar, in whose early death a poet and philosopher was lost, says of Shakespeare: "He sat pensive and alone above the hundred-handed play of his imagination." And Fanny Kemble, in her journal, describes a conversation upon the stage, in the tomb-scene of "Romeo and Juliet", where she, as Juliet, says to Mr. Romeo Keppel, "Where the devil is your dagger?" while all the tearful audience are lost in the soft woe of the scene.

This is very much opposed to the general theory of acting, and the story is told with great gusto of a boy who was sent to see Garrick, we believe, and who was greatly delighted with the fine phrasing and swagger of a supernumerary, but could not understand why people applauded such an ordinary bumpkin as Garrick, who did not differ a whit from all the country boobies he had ever seen. It is insisted that the actor must persuade the spectator that he is what he seems to be, and this is gravely put as the first and final proof of good acting.

This is, however, both a false view of art and a false interpretation and observation of experience. Shakespeare, through the mouth of Hamlet, tells the players to "hold the mirror up to nature"—that is, to represent nature. For what is the dramatic art, like all other arts, but a representation? If it aims to deceive the eye—if it tries to juggle the senses of the spectator—it is as trivial as if a painter should put real gold upon his canvas instead of representing gold by means of paint; or as if a sculptor should tinge the cheeks of his statue to make it more like a human face. We have seen tin pans so well represented in painting that the result was atrocious. For, if the object intended is really a tin pan, and not the pleasure produced by a conscious representation of one, then why not insert the veritable pan in the picture at once? If art is only a more or less successful imitation of natural objects, with a view to cheat the senses, it is an amusing game, but it is not a noble pursuit.

It is an equally false observation of experience; because, if the spectator were really deceived, if the actor became, in the mind of the audience, truly identical with the character he represents, then, when that character was odious, the audience would revolt. If we cannot quietly sit and see one dog tear another, without interfering, could we gravely look on and only put our handkerchiefs to our eyes, when Othello puts the pillow to the mouth of Desdemona? If we really supposed him to be a murderous man, how instantly we should leap upon the stage and rescue "the gentle lady". The truth is, to state it boldly, we know the roaring lion to be only Snug, the joiner.

All works of art must produce pleasure. Even the sternest and most repulsive subjects must be touched by art into a pensive beauty, or they fail to reach the height of great works. Goethe has shown this in the Laocoon, and every man feels it in constant experience. One of the grand themes of modern painting is the great tragedy of history, the Crucifixion. Materially it is repulsive, as the spectacle of a man in excruciating bodily torture; spiritually it is overwhelming, as the symbolized suffering of God for sin. If, now, the pictures which treat this subject were indeed only imitations of the scene, so that the spectator listened for the groans of agony and looked to see the blood drop from the brow crowned with thorns, how hideous and insupportable the sight would be! The mind is conscious as it contemplates the picture that it is a representation, and not a fact. The mere force of actuality is, therefore, destroyed, and thought busies itself with the moral significance of the scene. In the same way, in the tragedy of "Othello", conscious that there is not the actual physical suffering which there seems to be, the mind contemplates the real meaning which underlies that appearance, and curses jealousy and the unmanly passions.

Even in a very low walk of art the same principle is manifested. A man might not care to adorn his parlor with the carcass of an ox or a hog, nor invite to his table boors muzzy with beer. But the most elegant of nations prizes the pictures of Teniers at extraordinary prices, and hangs its galleries with works minutely representing the shambles. Here, again, the explanation is this: that the mind, rejecting any idea of actuality in the picture, is charmed with the delicacy of detail, with lovely color, with tone, with tenderness, and all these are qualities inseparable from the picture, and do not belong by any necessity to the actual carcasses of animals. In the shambles, the sense of disgust and repulsion overcomes any pleasure in light and color. In the parlor, if the spectator were persuaded by the picture to hold his nose, the thing would be as unlovely as it is in nature. Imitation pleases only so far as it is known to be imitation. If deception by imitation were the object of art, then the material of the sculptor should be wax, and not marble. Every visitor mistakes the sitting figure of Cobbett, in Madame Tussaud's collection of wax-works, for a real man, and will very likely, as we did, speak to it. But who would accost the Moses of Michael Angelo, or believe the sitting Medici in his chapel to have speech?