Mrs. Siddons

by Nina H. Kennard

In studying the annals of genius, it is interesting to observe how circumstances working from within force it on and bring it to completion, how circumstances working from without mould it into form, tempering the fine metal until it is supple and adaptable, but breaking the inferior metal by the sheer weight of their inexorable pressure.

Had Mrs. Siddons remained the brilliant, beautiful girl, with life undimmed by clouds, without experience of the bitterness and sorrow of life, she never could have acted Lady Macbeth. In her impetuous indignation at first, she herself said that never again would “she present herself before that audience that had treated her so savagely”; but the greater spirit within reasserted itself, and her genius emerged from the trial strengthened and expanded by a larger range of emotion and experience.

With her increased knowledge of life, the actress was enabled to form a more vivid conception of the character. She was naturally intensely masterful, determined, and ambitious, undaunted in peril. She had toiled, and attained the highest point of her ambition. She had known the incentives of distinction, worldly power, applause, yet she remained a woman, passionate and wayward in her affections to the last; and this is the view, seen through the medium of her own character, that she took of Lady Macbeth, and it was through her lofty impersonation of ambition in its highest and most sublimated form that she moved her audience to terror, and by this womanly tenderness that she moved them to sympathy and pity for the murderess of Banquo.

Mrs. Siddons had studied the part of Lady Macbeth when little more than a girl. She gives us a graphic account of the first time she learnt it for the purposes of stage representation:—

“It was my custom to study my characters at night, when all the domestic care and business were over. On the night preceding that in which I was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up as usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination. But to proceed. I went on with tolerable composure, in the silence of the night (a night I never can forget), till I came to the assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that made it impossible for me to get farther. I snatched up my candle, and hurried out of the room in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk, and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. At last I reached my chamber, where I found my husband fast asleep. I clapt my candlestick down upon the table, without the power of putting the candle out, and I threw myself on my bed without daring to stay even to take off my clothes. At peep of day I rose to resume my task; but so little did I know of my part when I appeared in it at night, that my shame and confusion cured me of procrastinating my business for the remainder of my life.”

People afterwards were inclined to find her formal and sententious, and even denied her sensibility off the stage; but it is impossible to read the account of the manner in which she entered into her parts, and how they took hold of her in her early days of work, without feeling that she had depths of pathos and sympathy in her disposition undreamt of by those who met her later when, under a dignified tragic manner, she had hidden her youthful spontaneity of feeling. We have only need of the evidence of the actors she acted with to see how deeply she entered into her part.

Miss Kelly said that when, as Constance, Mrs. Siddons wept over her, her collar was wet with her tears. Tom Davies is said to have declared that in the third act of the Fair Penitent she “turned pale under her rouge.” She tells us herself that “when called upon to personate the character of Constance, I never, from the beginning of the play to the end of my part in it, once suffered my dressing-room door to be closed, in order that my attention might be constantly fixed on those distressing events which, by this means, I could plainly hear going on upon the stage, the terrible effects of which progress were to be represented by me. Moreover, I never omitted to place myself, with Arthur in my hand, to hear the march, when, upon the reconciliation of England and France, they enter the gates of Angiers to ratify the contract of marriage between the Dauphin and the Lady Blanche, because the sickening sounds of that march would usually cause the bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of maternal affection to gush into my eyes.”

As a set-off against the above statement, we have Cumberland’s description of Mrs. Siddons coming off the stage in the full flush of triumph—having harrowed her audience with emotion—and walking up to the mirror in the green room to survey herself with perfect composure.

We imagine there is no law to be laid down on the subject of the amount of feeling an actor really puts into the part he is enacting. It must vary. Conventionality must, with the greatest of them, now and then take the place of emotion; or, as Talma expresses it, the “Métier must now and then take the place of Le vrai.”

We know the story of how once, when Garrick was playing King Lear, Johnson and Murphy kept up an animated conversation at the side-wing during one of his most important scenes. When Garrick came over the stage, he said, “You two talk so loud you destroy all my feelings.” “Prithee,” replied Johnson, “do not talk of feelings; Punch has no feeling”—a remark which is borne out by another account of Garrick as Lear rising from the dead body of his daughter Cordelia, where he had been convulsing the audience with sobs, running into the green-room gobbling like a turkey to amuse Kitty Clive and Mrs. Abington.