It is what survives of the child in us that makes us all playgoers, although in the early days of our playgoing the unsuspected resources of illusion which the theatre can command are often hard to endure. It is, I suppose, the experience of most children—it certainly was mine—that certain critical moments in drama, clearly foreseen and eagerly anticipated, nevertheless prove in realisation too thrilling and too intense for pure delight; and I can recall occasions, such desired moments being clearly in view, when I would address a whispered request to one of my elders that I might be permitted to watch the ensuing scene from the safe vantage ground of the corridor at the back of the dress circle. The small glass window in the red baize door provided just that added veil of distance which rendered the sufferings of the persons on the stage artistically tolerable. But the crisis once past—a crisis generally signalised by the explosion of a pistol—I was eager to return to my seat in order to appreciate with unabated enjoyment the consequences of an act of violence I had not had the courage to witness.
It is remarkable how little, in those very early days of playgoing, we are at all concerned with the personality of the actor. The story is all-absorbing, and in the poignant interest in the persons of the story, all memory of the performer as a separate entity is submerged and effaced. I had no thought at that time whether the actor was good or bad. His performance appeared to me to be inevitable and inevitably perfect. The day when he takes separate existence, apart from the character he is presenting, marks a revolution in the life of the playgoer, a revolution that is destined henceforward to complicate his emotions, with never again any possible return to that earlier and more confiding attitude when the illusion of the scene is absolute and complete. It is difficult even to recall the names of the actors who first greatly stirred me. They hardly stain my memory, for in my mind they had no separate existence. But with this revolution is born a new kind of enjoyment, that carries richer recollections. The limitless world of illusion shrinks to a narrower kingdom, but its triumphs are more vivid and more enduring: the sense of assumption and disguise is no longer so complete or so convincing, but the message of revelation, when it comes, brings with it a higher pleasure.
Nothing lives longer in remembrance, or pictures itself more vividly, than the first impression of the performance of a great actor. Phelps was the earliest of my heroes of this more sophisticated time, and the first of his performances I can recall was that of Falstaff in King Henry IV. produced at Drury Lane. Walter Montgomery was the Hotspur of the occasion, and young Edmund Phelps figured as Prince Hal. First impressions are hard to supplant, and the visual presentment of Falstaff even now always takes the form and shape assigned to him by the elder Phelps on that memorable evening. I saw him many times afterwards—in Othello and King John, in Mephistopheles, in Bayle Bernard’s version of Goethe’s play, in Wolsey, in Sir Pertinax M‘Sycophant, and in John Bull; and, although the more critical spirit of a later hour left him shorn of some part of that perfection I thought was his when I first saw him upon the stage, he ranks even now in my recollection as a great and gifted exponent of a great tradition. In his personality there was little to allure. It was rugged and bereft of many of the lighter graces that are calculated to win an audience; but his voice was incomparable, and the earnestness of the artist beyond reproach. Nor could variety of resource be denied him: he seemed equally equipped for his task as King John, Wolsey, or Falstaff, or as Bottom in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. He fought his way to a front rank in the profession at a time when older playgoers were full of memories of men who were perhaps his superiors—of Kemble, Kean, and, more recently, of Macready. But whatever he owed to any of them—and I do not suppose he was ever tempted to deny his debt—it is impossible not to concede to him a rare measure of individual power that must always leave him his due rank among the English interpreters of Shakespeare.
It must have been my first vision of Charles Fechter which enabled me to realise as by a flash how much Phelps suffered by lack of personal charm and grace. In those days I had not seen Fechter in Shakespeare. I knew him only as the victorious lover and the conquering hero of romantic drama. But, however conventional the material upon which his talent was employed, the glamour of his personality exercised an overpowering fascination.
To the youth of both sexes Fechter’s foreign accent constituted a charm in itself. The rising cadence of his voice struck heroically on the ear, and the swifter and freer gesture which came of his Gallic origin added something of extra fascination to the unquestionably great gifts with which he was endowed. In those days of the old Lyceum, when he was acting in melodramas like The Duke’s Motto and Bel Demonio, Miss Kate Terry was constantly his partner and the two together seemed to embody for the time the whole spirit of romance. But the moment of Fechter’s acting which is stamped most firmly in my recollection was in the last act of Ruy Blas. It was not till long afterwards when growing stoutness had robbed him of that grace of form which belonged to his earlier days, that I saw him in the part of Hamlet, and it is perhaps hardly fair to test his fitness as a Shakespearean actor by such later impressions. To me, however, that foreign cadence, which linked itself so well with the impersonation of romantic heroism, left a jarring note when it was yoked with the statelier measure of English verse; and it was not till long afterwards, when I saw Irving’s Hamlet, that I realised for the first time how much of the subtlety of the character and beauty of the play could be realised within the walls of a theatre.
The playgoer’s memories refuse to obey any strict chronological order. They are rather governed by vividness of impression, which summons with equal distinctness things seen long ago and triumphs of a more recent date. My first vision of Sarah Bernhardt retains always a foremost place in my playgoing experience. It was in Paris in the spring of 1876, and the play was L’Étrangère. She was surrounded by a company of rare distinction—Coquelin, Croisette, and Mounet-Sully amongst them. But I remember, as she came upon the stage, that a creature almost of another race seemed suddenly to have invaded, and, at a single stroke, to be dominating, the scene. Her personality appeared at once to announce a new dialect in the language of Art. Her mode of speech and her method of acting left almost unregarded and unremembered the particular language in which the play was written. In virtue of her genius she became at once an international possession, leaving, by comparison, the artists around her almost provincial in style and method. I had previously seen Ristori, and had marvelled at the wonders of her art in Lucrezia Borgia and in Mary Stuart, an art that was struck in a larger mould than Sarah Bernhardt could claim; and I afterwards had to acknowledge the superb force and matchless physical resource which Salvini brought to the theatre. But in neither case does the first impression stand out so vividly in recollection as that first impression of Sarah Bernhardt in Dumas’ play. And yet I remember Sir Frederick Leighton, whose recollections of the theatre went back to an earlier day, telling me that the effect produced by Rachel left Sarah Bernhardt’s art by comparison almost in the region of the commonplace.
I have mentioned the name of Coquelin, whose talent in the region of comedy was consummate, and even in this very performance of L’Étrangère his impersonation of the Duc de Septmonts leaves an ineffaceable recollection. But I had already seen him in Molière, and it was the endless resource with which he furnished the creations of the master dramatist of France that gives him, I think, his unapproachable place in the modern theatre. His own rich enjoyment of every discovered detail of the carefully constructed portrait carried with it the magic of infection, and, as the work grew under his hand, the spectator was left with a pitiful consciousness of his own dulness in having gathered from the written page so small a part of the author’s manifest intention. In so far as the actor’s art seeks for the triumphs of assumption and disguise, Coquelin was, indeed, beyond the reach of rivalry, and it was perhaps pardonable, in view of his own splendid achievement, that he should have been disposed to question the claims of those whose mastery in this particular direction was not so complete as his own. Coquelin to the last was intolerant of all acting which allowed the personality of the performer to override the identity of the particular character to be presented. He could be admiring, and even enthusiastic, over the art of Irving, but always with an implied reservation—the English actor never, to his thinking, sufficiently effaced himself in his part; the performance, however brilliant in intellectual force, was marred, in Coquelin’s judgment, by an imperfect surrender of personality, and by a corresponding incompleteness of assumption. And that was an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the French artist.
It was agreeable to discuss these matters with Coquelin, for he was a brilliant talker, quick in insight, and ever ready with the terse and fit phrase to illustrate his meaning. And it was peculiarly interesting to me, because the argument touched upon problems in the actor’s art that I have always thought to be profoundly significant. How far may the personality of the performer intrude itself in the presentation of the chosen character, and to what extent are assumption and disguise part of the indispensable equipment of the artist? These are questions which every generation is apt to raise in regard to its popular favourites upon the stage. And the answer is not easy to find. To very many it will seem indisputable that versatility carries with it the hall-mark of perfection, and that no actor can claim absolute victory in any individual achievement unless we are allowed completely to forget the person in the impersonation. Such critics are the avowed champions of the art of disguise, and yet, to me at least, they leave out of account the most profound and most memorable impressions which the theatre is able to yield. The scenes which have most deeply moved me, the performers whose art has stirred me to the strongest emotion, are hardly associated in memory with any particular triumph of characterisation. It is, in short, not disguise, but revelation, which evokes and demands the highest histrionic gifts. The ingenuity and resource that can distinguish and exhibit the markings of varying personality must, of course, always count for much, but the imaginative power which can recreate upon the scene the simpler and deeper emotions that are common to us all must surely count for more; and in the exercise of this higher power the lighter accessories employed to achieve completeness of disguise must often be discarded and forgotten, as the actor’s personality, impatient of all lesser fetters that impede its utterance, becomes wholly engaged in the task of communicating to his audience the deeper and more enduring passions of our common humanity.
Of course, some may dream that these opposite qualities may be combined. I have never seen them combined in any measure of completeness. I remember thinking, when I first saw Sarah Bernhardt in Frou-Frou, that her portraiture fell far short of that of Desclée, the original creator of the rôle. And so, in fact, it did. The countless subtleties, by means of which the earlier performer had established the identity of the frivolous heroine of one of the most masterly of modern French plays, were all lacking in the work of her successor; but in the great scene in the third act, where the tensity of the situation sounds a deeper note of drama, I felt disposed to forget that any other Frou-Frou had ever existed. Another illustration pointing in the same direction may be found in the exquisite art of the Italian actress, Eleanora Duse. When I saw her in the Dame aux camélias it was impossible to believe even for a moment that this perfect embodiment of all that is beautiful in feminine nature owned even the remotest relationship to the courtesan whom Dumas had set himself to present upon the stage. The unconquerable purity of her artistic personality left her helpless in the presence of her chosen task. As mere assumption the performance counted for next to nothing, and yet in its exquisite power to reveal the ever-deepening emotions of a suffering human soul it was incomparable and superb. It chanced that only three nights afterwards I saw Sarah Bernhardt in this same play, and the contrast was striking and instructive. It might have been another story; it certainly was another and a widely different character. Possibly neither artist rendered faithfully the author’s intention, and yet both had produced an impression of intense enjoyment, such as the theatre is rarely able to confer.
On both of these evenings I had the good fortune to sit beside Miss Ellen Terry, whose presence in the theatre I think contributed in no small degree to the almost inspired performances of her comrades upon the stage. I am not indiscreet enough to reveal her comparative judgment of their competing claims, but I remember considering at the time how far her own presentation of Marguerite Gauthier, if she had ever undertaken the part, would have compared with the conception of either. Here, again, is an instance of an artist who has never sought, or who has sought in vain, to hide her own identity; and yet of those who have felt the magic of her influence in the ideal figure of Ophelia, in the exquisite raillery of Beatrice, or in the tender sentiment of Olivia, who is there who would deny her right to the foremost place in her profession? With her most surely the final effect and impression rest upon powers of revelation—upon the ability to realise and to interpret the simplest and the subtlest phases of emotion, far more than upon those artifices of deception that make for the more obvious triumphs of disguise.