114.
A celebrated German actress (who has quitted the stage for many years) speaking of Rachel, said that the reason she must always stop short of the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but an actress—that only; and has no aims in life, has no duties, feelings, employments, sympathies, but those which centre in herself in the interests of her art;—which thus ceases to be art and becomes a métier.
This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once said to me:—“D’abord je suis femme, avec les dévoirs, les affections, les sentiments d’une femme; et puis je suis artiste.”
115.
The same German actress whose opinion I have quoted, told me that the Leonora and the Iphigenia of Goethe were the parts she preferred to play. The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In all these she excelled.) The parts easiest to her, requiring no effort scarcely, were Jerta (in Houwald’s Tragedy, “Die Schuld”), and Clärchen in Egmont; of the character of Jerta, she said beautifully:—“Ich habe es nicht gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!” (I did not play it, I uttered it.) This was extremely characteristic of the woman.
I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment’s consideration, and in her rich deliberate emphatic tones:—“Lady Macbeth is the character I have most studied.” She afterwards said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading over the part and generally the whole play in the morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it; “something,” she said, “which had not struck me so much as it ought to have struck me.”
Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in the part of Lady Macbeth, it was well known that she had never read the play. She merely studied her own part as written out by the stage-copyist; of the other parts she knew nothing but the cues.
116.
When I asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her characters she preferred playing? she said at once “Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I played with most ease to myself, and most success as regarded the public; it cost no effort.”
This was confirmed by others. A very good judge said of her—“In some of her best parts, as Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have been approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen she was never equalled. In the grace and simplicity of the first, in the refinement and shy but impassioned tenderness of the last, I at least have never seen any one to be compared to her. She hardly seemed to act these parts; they came naturally to her.”