“Well, I don’t know. He didn’t seem to be regarding the affair in the light of a self-sacrifice. Suppose he had rather lost the sense of it’s being a favor to you?”
“I should like that all the better.”
Those who remember the impression made among people who knew of her, by the announcement that Mrs. Farrell was going upon the stage, will recall the curiosity which attended her appearance in Boston, after her debut in a Western city, where she had played a season. There is always something vastly pitiable in the first attempts of a woman to please the public from the stage; this is especially the case if she is not to the theater born, and confronts in her audience the faces she has known in the world; and her audience may have felt a peculiar forlornness in Mrs. Farrell’s position: at any rate it showed itself the kindest of houses, and seized with eager applause every good point of her performance. Her beauty in itself was almost sufficient to achieve success for her. It had never appeared to greater advantage. During the first two acts, it seemed to prosper from moment to moment, under all those admiring eyes, like the immediate gift of Heaven, as if she were inspired to be more and more beautiful by her consciousness of her beauty’s power; and whether she walked or sat, or only stirred in some chosen posture amid the volume of her robes, she expressed a grace that divinely fascinated. Her girlish presence enabled her to realize that Juliet to many whose sensitive ideal refused the robust pretensions of more mature actresses; she might have played the part well or not, but there could be no question but she looked it. She had costumed it with a splendor which the modern taste might have accused of overdressing, but which was not discordant with a poetic sense of the magnificence of mediæval Verona. Her Juliet was no blond, Gretchen-like maiden in blue and white, but an impassioned southern girl in the dark reds and rich greens that go well with that beauty; she might have studied her dress from that of some superb patrician in a canvas of Cagliari. But with her beauty, her grace, and her genius for looking and dressing the character, her perfect triumph ended; there was something perplexingly indefinite in the nature or the cause of her failure, at those points where she failed. To some she simply appeared unequal to a sustained imagination of the character. Others thought her fatigued by the physical effort, which must be a very great one. Perhaps no one was of a very decided mind about her performance.
“It was good, yes—and it wasn’t good, either,” said one of those critical spirits, rather commoner in Boston than elsewhere, who analyze and refine and re-refine and shrink from a final impression, with a perseverance that leaves one in doubt whether they have any opinion about the matter. “I should say she had genius, yes; genius for something— I don’t know; I suppose the drama. I dare say I saw her without the proper perspective; I was crowded so close to her by what I’d heard of her off the stage, don’t you know. I don’t think the part was well chosen; and yet she did some things uncommonly well; all that passionate lovemaking of the first part was magnificent; but there was some detracting element, even there— I don’t know what; I suppose she didn’t let you think enough of Juliet; you couldn’t help thinking how very charming she was, herself; she realized the part the wrong way. There was inspiration in it, and I should say study; yes, there was a good deal of study; but, after all, it wasn’t so much art as it was nature and artifice. It wanted smoothness, unity; perhaps that might come, by and by. She had a very kind house; you know what our audiences usually are; they wouldn’t turn the thumb down, but they’d make an unlucky gladiator wish they would. But they were very good to her, last night, and applauded her hits like a little man. She didn’t seem to have given herself a fair chance. Perhaps she wasn’t artistically large enough for the theater. I shouldn’t have said, at first, that she was particularly suggestive of the home circle; very likely, if I’d met her off the stage, I should have pronounced her too theatrical; and yet there was a sort of appealing domesticity about her, after all—especially in her failures. It’s a pity she couldn’t take some particular line of the profession, in which she could somehow produce a social effect, don’t you know! I’ll tell you what; she could do something perfectly charming in the way of what they call sketches—character sketches—little morsels of drama that she could have all to herself, with the audience in her confidence—a sort of partner in the enterprise, like the audience at private theatricals. That’s it; that’s the very thing! She’d be the greatest possible success in private theatricals.”
“Well, Robert, it’s better than I ever dreamt she could do,” said Mrs. Gilbert, as they drove home from the theater. “But what a life for a woman! How hard and desolate at the best. Well, she’s sufficiently punished!”
“Yes,” said her husband, “it’s a great pity they couldn’t somehow make up their minds to marry each other.”
“Never! There are things they can never get over.”
“Oh, people get over all sorts of things. And even according to your own showing, she behaved very well when it came to the worst.”
“Yes, I shall always say that of her. But she was to blame for it’s coming to the worst. No, a whole lifetime wouldn’t be enough to atone for what she’s done.”
“It wouldn’t, in a romance. But in life you have to make some allowance for human nature. I had no idea she was so charming.”