“When Macbeth appears, she seems so insensible to everything but the horrible design which has probably been suggested to her by his letters, as to have entirely forgotten both the one and the other. It is very remarkable that Macbeth is frequent in expressions of tenderness to his wife, while she never betrays one symptom of affection towards him, till, in the fiery furnace of affliction, her iron heart is melted down to softness.” This was the side by which Mrs. Siddons had taken such a grasp of the character of Lady Macbeth. It was by bringing into prominence this softer side of her character that, while thrilling her audience with horror, she at the same time brought tears to their eyes with an immense awe-struck pity. She always held their interest by the human touches which she brought into as much prominence as possible.
Alluding to the lines:—
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me,
she says: “Even here, horrified as she is, she shows herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature. The very use of such a tender allusion in the midst of her dreadful language, persuades one unequivocally that she has really felt the maternal yearnings of a mother towards her babe, and that she considered this action the most enormous that ever required the strength of human nerves for its perpetration. Her language to Macbeth is the most potently eloquent that guilt could use. It is only in soliloquy that she invokes the powers of hell to unsex her. To her husband she avows, and the naturalness of her language makes us believe her, that she had felt the instinct of filial as well as maternal love. But she makes her very virtues the means of a taunt to her lord: ‘You have the milk of human kindness in your heart,’ she says (in substance) to him, ‘but ambition, which is my ruling passion, would be also yours if you had courage. With a hankering desire to suppress, if you could, all your weaknesses of sympathy, you are too cowardly to will the deed, and can only dare to wish it. You speak of sympathies and feelings. I, too, have felt with a tenderness which your sex cannot know; but I am resolute in my ambition to trample on all that obstructs my way to a crown. Look to me, and be ashamed of your weakness.”
“In the tremendous suspense of these moments” (when Duncan sleeps), Mrs. Siddons again tells us, “while she recollects her habitual humanity, one trait of tender feelings is expressed: ‘Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.’”
Through many pages Mrs. Siddons thus gives us her views of the character of Lady Macbeth; sometimes verging on a pomposity that is almost Johnsonese. Her later criticisms of the parts in which she acted, bear out the statement that hers was not an intellectual power that strengthened or expanded after the “middle of the road of life.” This year, 1785, saw her great triumph. But we doubt if she had not already mastered the idea of chilling and terrifying her audience when, as she describes, she worked herself into a paroxysm of terror on first studying the part as a young girl. The physical power and confidence to communicate that terror were hers now, but the intellectual comprehension had been there before, and certainly did not increase; on the contrary, it deteriorated with years. The power of fresh comprehension passed away, and with it the elasticity and variety of her earlier effects; and from being singularly simple and direct, she became stagey and artificial. An artist gets certain words to utter; he gets the skeleton sketch, as it were, of the character he has to portray, but the emphasis and passion he puts into them, which go direct from his heart to the heart of his audience, must be his, and his alone, and must be as little as possible the effect of study or deliberation. Thus the ingredients of terror, ambition, and wifely and maternal love, were the uncomplex emotions at first impressed on Mrs. Siddons’s brain by the study of the part; and those were the predominating influences by which she swayed her audience to the last day she acted it.
Many are the records that we have of this great performance—all the world has heard of the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons—but, alas! how insufficient are they to give us an idea of the wondrous reality. The weird-like tones, that sent an involuntary shudder through the house; the bewildered melancholy; and, lastly, the piteous cry of the strong heart broken, have come down to us as traditions; but the grandeur of her majesty, the earnest accents as the demon of the character took possession of her, must ever remain an unknown sensation to us. One who saw her once act it from the side scenes, with the disillusion of red ochre, that was daubed on by her maid under his eyes; her whisper, which Christopher North eloquently termed “the escaping sighs and moans of the bared soul”; her face, the terrible mixture of hope, apprehension, and resolution, gave him a sickly feeling of reality. His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, in spite of the evidence of his eyes that the assassination was a piece of mechanical trickery in which the paint-pot played a conspicuous part. If a detective had made his appearance at the moment, he declares he would immediately have given himself up as particeps criminis, accessory before and after the event. The whole fiction, so inimitably played and so powerfully described, had kicked fact and reason off the throne.
But we must return to the first night. It was the 2nd of February. All the intellect and fashion of the town were present: Burke, Fox, Wyndham, Gibbon, in the front row, and, above all, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who took a particular interest in her performance of the character. He had a seat in the orchestra, where he was privileged to sit on account of his deafness. He had constantly urged her to act Lady Macbeth before, and had designed her dress for the sleep-walking scene. Needless to say that her usual nervousness was magnified tenfold. All had declared her incapable of rendering the grander plays of Shakespeare. She had reached, they maintained, the highest point which she was capable of attaining, and her straining higher was simply presumption. She knew, therefore, that if she had been criticised before, the observations now would be much more severe. The representation of the other parts also did not satisfy her. Smith, popularly known as “Gentleman Smith” because he generally did the light and airy part of lover in comedy parts, was the Macbeth, Brereton the Macduff, and Bensley the Banquo; and the memory of the popularity of Mrs. Pritchard in the part, seemed to stand between her and her audience. She had already begged Dr. Johnson to let her know his opinion of Mrs. Pritchard, whom she had never seen, and she tells us in her Autograph Recollections that he answered:—
“‘Madam, she was a vulgar idiot; she used to speak of her “gownd,” and she never read any part in a play in which she acted except her own. She no more thought of the play out of which her part was taken than a shoemaker thinks of the skin out of which the piece of leather of which he is making a pair of shoes is cut.’ Is it possible, thought I, that Mrs. Pritchard, the greatest of all the Lady Macbeths, should never have read the play? and I concluded that the Doctor must have been misinformed; but I was afterwards assured by a gentleman, a friend of Mrs. Pritchard, that he had supped with her one night after she had acted Lady Macbeth, and that she declared she had never perused the whole tragedy. I cannot believe it.”