But, however noble and pathetic such a rendering may be, it consorts better with the ideas and demands of the present time than with those of the Elizabethan age. The dramatist who began by writing Titus Andronicus had at least no instinctive distaste to repulsive subjects, no fear of shocking his audience by an exhibition of untamed barbarity. Othello is "of a free and open nature," he is "great of heart," he is above doing wrong without provocation, real or supposed. But his nature admits no possibility of self-control, of reason in the midst of doubts, of patience under injury. His temperament betrays itself in physical exhibitions wild and portentous. "You are fatal then when your eyes roll so," is the suggestive cry of Desdemona. In his perplexity and fury he swoons and foams. He overhears an insult to Venice and slays the traducer. His language to the wife whom he still loves while believing himself dishonored by her is such that "a beggar, in his drink, could not have laid such terms upon his callet." He outrages her kinsman and a throng of attendants by striking her in their presence. Her protestations of innocence serve only to inflame him, and he cuts short her last pleadings with his murderous hand in a way which would have forced M. Dumas fils himself to cry out, "Ne tue la pas!"
How are this fury and this credulity, both equally insensate, to be explained, how are they to be reconciled with traits that compel sympathy and admiration, except as the workings of a nature essentially uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but while subject to those fiery tests under which all that is foreign or acquired melts away, and the primal components of the character are revealed in their bareness and in their depths. Othello's race is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. It throws a fatality on that marriage which seems unnatural even to those who yet do not suspect that the discordancy lies deeper than in the complexion. It makes him the easy victim of a plot which would otherwise only have ensnared its concoctor. It sweeps away all impediments to the catastrophe, making it swift, inevitable and dire. And it is by seizing upon this central fact that Salvini has been enabled to render his performance artistically perfect. Were the conception radically false, there could not be the same unity in the execution, the same harmony in the details. We shall not assert that his is the ideal Othello, or that such an Othello is possible. Shakespeare's creations cannot be bounded by the limit of another idiosyncrasy. But we hold that, if he does not put into the character all that belongs to it, he puts nothing into it that does not belong to it. We may miss in the accents of his despair a pathos capable of assuaging our horror; but this latter emotion, equally legitimate, is commonly stifled altogether, leaving us more disposed to linger lovingly beside the dead than to shudder and exclaim with Ludovico, "The object poisons sight;—let it be hid."
A.F.
A LETTER FROM NEW YORK.
I have come from the country. I have seen Salvini. All emotion has to be expressed now in the above form, for Salvini rules. He is simply the greatest actor since Rachel, and his troupe the most perfect ever seen in this country. The whole plane of their acting is forty steps higher than we are accustomed to; therefore it has been slow of gaining appreciation, and the panic having burst over the devoted city just as Salvini opened, the houses have been poor. He should play, too (all actors should), in a smaller house than the Academy of Music. His first great success may therefore date from a matinée at Wallack's, where he had the most distinguished audience I have ever seen in New York, on Saturday, October 11th. Salvini lunched while here with Madame Botta, and expressed himself surprised that any one should care to go to hear him who could not understand the language. "I am sure I should not go," said the great actor. He thinks he has not had a success, but he will not think so after he becomes accustomed to his audiences. He is in private one of the most cultivated and intelligent of men, and has brought to the practice of his art a scholar's study, a soldier's experience and a gentleman's taste. I say a soldier's experience, for Salvini has been a soldier, and fought for united Italy in 1857 and earlier.
Nilsson is much improved by marriage. Her beauty is softer, she has gained flesh—not to the detriment of that girlish outline, but to the improvement of those somewhat aggressive cheek-bones. She sings better than ever, with rounded voice. Never since the days of Salvi and Steffanoni have we had such opera in New York. The orchestra is better, Maurel is superb, Capoul is still better, and Campanini is very admirable. We miss Jamet very much in Mephisto, but every one else is better than before. The house is not gay—it misses many of its old habitués. Five empty boxes in a row tell of the financial troubles. It was the fashion to laugh at the Wall street men, but they gave gayety and life and movement up town as well as down town. Many of those whose names are recorded on the wrong side of the list were our most generous givers and most amiable hosts. Their misfortunes cause nothing but regrets.
The races at first felt the effects of the panic, but the crowd on Saturday, the 11th of October, was immense. Somebody must get the money that everybody loses; therefore somebody can still afford to go to the races, and the last day was also very full. Two drags set the English example of having the horses taken off and dining on the top of the coach. The notes of a key-bugle from one of them seemed to suggest Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Ben Allen; but whether those young gentlemen were of the party or not I did not hear. With our delicious sky, and particularly this golden autumn, there seems to be no reason why we should not adopt the fashions of Chantilly and Ascot. We are, however, a gregarious people, and the tendency is to gather together under the protection of the grand stand.
Poor Maretzek is always the first to go, and it is understood that his opera is among the great unpaid. Every one is sorry for the poor singers, always excepting Lucca, whose jealousy of Nilsson is so aggressive that she has declared that she would sing her off the boards of the Academy of Music. She is driven like a bad angel out of Paradise, while the starry Nilsson in magnificent triumph sings on superbly to constantly increasing houses at the Academy, and is lunched and fêted to her heart's content.
The Evangelical Alliance has gone, and left behind it nothing but animosities. It was really a vast movement of the Presbyterian Church: Geneva and Calvin were the exclusive proprietors. Episcopalians, Unitarians and Baptists, Methodists and Universalists, were requested to stand aside. The communions were always at some Presbyterian church. Perhaps they thought the Episcopal Church exclusive, as some one said an Englishman carried his pride into his prayers, and said, "O Lord, I do most haughtily beseech thee," and that the Unitarians felt "that any man who had been born in Boston did not see the necessity of being born again."