But perhaps the most interesting of all eulogies of the actress is contained in a letter to Garrick by his Danish correspondent, Sturtz—a really masterly description, which suffers but little from the fact of the writer being a foreigner, and which we, therefore, need make no apology for producing at length:—
"In such a representing nation, I had a great opinion of their stage, and yet I was disappointed. It seems the quality has forestalled the best parts for them alone, for I saw but an indifferent medley of plays.
"There is, indeed, Mme. Clairon, standing alone amidst the ruins of the Republic, shooting for the last rays of a departing star. I have gazed on her when she trod the stage as Queen of Carthage,[166] worthy that rank and above the mob of queens; she inspired every sentiment; she displays every passion, and, I dare say, she felt none: all the storm was on the surface, waves ran high, and the bottom was calm; her despair and her grief rose and died at the end of her tongue.
" ...She goes through a number of opposite feelings: soft melancholy, despair, languid tenderness, raving fury, scorn, and melting love; there is not one passion absent. She is wonderful in those transitions where an inferior actress, from an intense grief, would, at some lucky event, jump on a sudden to a giddy, wanton joy. Mme. Clairon, though exulting at her new-born hope that Æneas might stay, keeps always the dark colour of sorrow; when her eye brightens through her tears, she looks, as Ossian expresses it, 'like the moon through a watery cloud.' Her characteristic perfection is the scornful, the commanding part; then is nobility spread about her as a glory round the head of a saint; and yet she never puts off the woman; in the midst of violent rage she is always the tender female, and a nuance of love softens the hard colour into harmony.
" ...Nature has done a good deal in favour of Madame Clairon; her voice is melody, of a vast extent, and capable of numberless inflexions; however, I was sometimes unwillingly disturbed by a disagreeable shrill cry, rather expressing physical pain. As to her figure, it is not a very elegant one, her head being rather too big and her whole person too little; and yet she is great, towering amongst the crowd in the height of action;[167] so as you see by the enchantment of art a colossal head of Jupiter in a cameo the size of sixpence. Were I in a temper to find fault with her, I might mention her too articulate declamation, the cadence of every motion; but then I might as well charge Raphael with having too carefully marked his contours, which are the admiration and the models of every age. True it is that compound of excellence is a mere compound of art; were it possible to note action, as music, then she would show a fortnight before every mien, the measure of every tone, the tension of every march on paper. She is else quite free from that disagreeable tragical hiccup so epidemical in France, and so awkwardly returning at the end of every verse; she never shakes so affectedly her head, as some others, in what you call the graceful style, forsooth; and she alone may venture some bold strokes, which would never do else with so well-bred, so elegant an audience.
"So when she heard that all was lost, that Æneas was gone, then, in the rage of despair, with her two hands across, she beat her forehead with such a gloomy, death-threatening look that we all stood aghast, and her cry raised horror in every breast. I cannot say that she killed herself well, though, but she died well; her weakening voice was not a childish, whining tone, but imminent dissolution altered it, convulsion raised it, and so it vanished into the air as a vapour. There, then, I have brought her to the highest pitch of glory of your tribe, self-murder; may she now quietly repose!"[168]
And Garrick replies, laying his finger, with unerring instinct, upon the one weak spot in Mlle. Clairon's acting:—
"What shall I say to you, my dear friend, about 'the Clairon.' Your dissection of her is as accurate as if you had opened her alive; she has everything that art and a good understanding, with great natural spirit, can give her. But there I fear (and I only tell you my fears and open my soul to you) the heart has none of those instantaneous feelings, that life-blood, that keen sensibility, that bursts at once from genius, and, like electrical fire, shoots through the veins, marrow, bones, and all, of every spectator. Madame Clairon is so conscious and so certain of what she can do, that she never, I believe, had the feelings of the instant come upon her unexpectedly; but I pronounce that the greatest strokes of genius have been unknown to the actor himself till circumstances and the warmth of the scene has sprung the mine, as it were, as much to his own surprise as to that of the audience. Thus I make a great difference between a great genius and a good actor. The first will always realise the feelings of his character, and be transported beyond himself; while the other, with great powers and good sense, will give great pleasure to an audience, but never
| ——"'Pectus inaniter angit, |
| Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet, |
| Ut magus.' |