And now that the audience, touched by the artistic novelty of his appearance, and moved by their sentiments of hospitality, had given vent to their feelings, they settled down to allow the actor, of whose methods they had heard so much, to conquer their favorable opinion if he could. Despite the prejudices of some, and the annoyance of those who had been victimized by the speculators, auditors were willing to be captured,—nay, were desirous, if they could honestly do so, to endorse the verdict of their cousins of England, as to the place which Henry Irving holds in dramatic art.
“The Bells” is a weird play. Its lines are simple; it never halts. Mathias is an inn-keeper. He murders his guest, a Polish Jew, murders him on the highway for his gold, and is forever haunted by his crime. The jangle of the sleigh-bells, as the Jew’s horse gallops away after its master’s death, is continually in the assassin’s ears. Their sad music trickles through the story like the ripple of a rising stream through stubble-fields in autumn. It sweeps over the dramatic narrative like the sighing of the wind in “chill October.” Remorse takes possession of the criminal; he dreams he is being tried for his life.
This scene affords special opportunities for illustrating Irving’s dramatic magnetism. The judicial court of his dreamland forces him to submit to the operations of a mesmerist. Under this influence he makes confession of his crime by reënacting it. Nothing more weirdly suggestive can be imagined. Before an audience as breathless as the court, the actor went through the pantomime of stopping the Jew’s horse, cutting down the Jew with an axe, plundering the body and thrusting it into a lime-kiln. Then, convicted and condemned, the murderer dies under the violent shock to his nerves of this retributive force of imagination,—dies while the church-bells are ringing for his daughter’s marriage,—his last agonizing words, “Take the rope from my throat!”
Only a daring artist would undertake such a part; only a great one could succeed in it. Most of the second and last acts is a monologue; and, in a country like America, which is accustomed to rapidity of thought and action, Irving was courageous in risking the result of so serious a strain upon the mind of a highly strung audience. The experiment, however, was entirely a triumph, notwithstanding the previously-mentioned discomforts attending an overcrowded house, and the rain that stormed without.
III.
The curtain having fallen on the first act, Irving received the honor of a triple call, after which I went to his room, and found him reading some of the numerous cables and telegrams from home, and from several distant American and Canadian cities, wishing him success.
“How kind everybody is!” he exclaimed, as he handed me a bundle of despatches. “You should have seen the hundreds of telegrams and letters that were sent to me on board the steamer as I was leaving Liverpool!”
“You are pleased?”
“More than pleased,” he said. “What an audience! I never played to a more sympathetic lot of people in my life. They respond to every movement and point of the scene with a marvellous promptitude.”