There must be imagination, or pathos, or weirdness, or some form of humour, or a personal charm in the character that awakens the soul of Henry Irving and calls forth his best and finest powers. There is little of that quality in Shylock. But Henry Irving took the high view of him. This Jew "feeds fat the ancient grudge" against Antonio—until the law of Portia, more subtle than equitable, interferes to thwart him; but also he avenges the wrongs that his "sacred nation" has suffered. His ideal was right, his grasp of it firm, his execution of it flexible with skill and affluent with intellectual power. If memory carries away a shuddering thought of his baleful gaze upon the doomed Antonio and of his horrid cry of the summons "Come, prepare!" it also retains the image of a father convulsed with grief—momentarily, but sincerely—and of a man who at least can remember that he once loved. It was a most austere Shylock, inveterate of purpose, vindictive, malignant, cruel, ruthless; and yet it was human. No creature was ever more logical and consistent in his own justification. By purity, sincerity, decorum, fanaticism, the ideal was aptly suggestive of such men as Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and John Felton—persons who, with prayer on their lips, were nevertheless capable of hideous cruelty. The street scene demands utterance, not repression. The Jew raves there, and no violence would seem excessive. Macklin, Kean, Cooke, and the elder Booth, each must have been terrific at that point. Henry Irving's method was that of the intense passion that can hardly speak—the passion that Kean is said to have used so grandly in giving the curse of Junius Brutus upon Tarquin. But, there was just as much of Shylock's nature in Henry Irving's performance as in any performance that is recorded. The lack was overwhelming physical power—not mentality and not art. At "No tears but of my shedding" Henry Irving's Shylock took a strong clutch upon the emotions and created an effect that will never be forgotten.
Ellen Terry's Portia long ago became a precious memory. The part makes no appeal to the tragic depths of her nature, but it awakens her fine sensibility, stimulates the nimble play of her intellect, and cordially promotes that royal exultation in the affluence of physical vitality and of spiritual freedom that so often seems to lift her above the common earth. There have been moments when it seemed not amiss to apply Shakespeare's own beautiful simile to the image of queen-like refinement, soft womanhood, and spiritualised intellect that this wonderful actress presented—"as if an angel dropped down from the clouds." Her Portia was stately, yet fascinating; a woman to inspire awe and yet to captivate every heart. Nearer to Shakespeare's meaning than that no actress can ever go. The large, rich, superb manner never invalidated the gentle blandishments of her sex. The repressed ardour, the glowing suspense, the beautiful modesty and candour with which she awaited the decision of the casket scene, showed her to be indeed all woman, and worthy of a true man's love. Here was no paltering of a puny nature with great feelings and a great experience. And never in our day has the poetry of Shakespeare fallen from human lips in a strain of such melody—with such teeming freedom of felicitous delivery and such dulcet purity of diction.
XII.
JOHN McCULLOUGH IN SEVERAL CHARACTERS.
There is no greater gratification to the intellect than the sense of power and completeness in itself or the perception of power and completeness in others. Those attributes were in John McCullough's acting and were at the heart of its charm. His repertory consisted of thirty characters, but probably the most imposing and affecting of his embodiments was Virginius. The massive grandeur of adequacy in that performance was a great excellence. The rugged, weather-beaten plainness of it was full of authority and did not in the least detract from its poetic purity and ideal grace. The simplicity of it was like the lovely innocence that shines through the ingenuous eyes of childhood, while its majesty was like the sheen of white marble in the sunlight. It was a very high, serious, noble work; yet,—although, to his immeasurable credit, the actor never tried to apply a "natural" treatment to artificial conditions or to speak blank verse in a colloquial manner,—it was made sweetly human by a delicate play of humour in the earlier scenes, and by a deep glow of paternal tenderness that suffused every part of it and created an almost painful sense of sincerity. Common life was not made commonplace life by McCullough, nor blank verse depressed to the level of prose. The intention to be real—the intention to love, suffer, feel, act, defend, and avenge, as a man of actual life would do—was obvious enough, through its harmonious fulfilment; yet the realism was shorn of all triteness, all animal excess, all of those ordinary attributes which are right in nature, and wrong because obstructive in the art that is nature's interpretation.
Just as the true landscape is the harmonious blending of selected natural effects, so the true dramatic embodiment is the crystallization of selected attributes in any given type of human nature, shown in selected phases of natural condition. McCullough did not present Virginius brushing his hair or paying Virginia's school-bills; yet he suggested him, clearly and beautifully, in the sweet domestic repose and paternal benignity of his usual life—making thus a background of loveliness, on which to throw, in lines of living light, the terrible image of his agonising sacrifice. And when the inevitable moment came for his dread act of righteous slaughter it was the moral grandeur, the heart-breaking paternal agony, and the overwhelming pathos of the deed that his art diffused—not the "gashed stab," the blood, the physical convulsion, the revolting animal shock. Neither was there druling, or dirt, or physical immodesty, or any other attribute of that class of the natural concomitants of insanity, in the subsequent delirium.
A perfect and holy love is, in one aspect of it, a sadder thing to see than the profoundest grief. Misery, at its worst, is at least final: and for that there is the relief of death. But love, in its sacred exaltation,—the love of the parent for the child,—is so fair a mark for affliction that one can hardly view it without a shudder of apprehensive dread. That sort of love was personified in McCullough's embodiment of Virginius, and that same nameless thrill of fear was imparted by its presence,—even before the tragedian, with an exquisite intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances of the "natural" school; and all the time it was maintained at the lofty level of classic grace. It would be impossible to overstate the excellence of all that McCullough did and said, in the forum scene—the noble severity of the poise, the grace of the outlines, the terrible intensity of the mood, the heartrending play of the emotions, the overwhelming delirium of the climax. Throughout the subsequent most difficult portraiture of shattered reason the actor never, for an instant, lost his steadfast grasp upon sympathy and inspiration. Every heart knew the presence of a nature that could feel all that Virginius felt and suffer and act all that Virginius suffered and acted; and, beyond this, in his wonderful investiture of the mad scenes with the alternate vacancy and lamentable and forlorn anguish of a special kind of insanity, every judge of the dramatic art recognised the governing touch of a splendid intellect, imperial over all its resources and instruments of art.
Virginius as embodied by McCullough was a man of noble and refined nature; lovely in life; cruelly driven into madness; victorious over dishonour, by a deed of terrible heroism; triumphant over crime, even in forlorn and pitiable dethronement and ruin; and, finally, released by the celestial mercy of death. And this was shown by a poetic method so absolute that Virginius, while made an actual man to every human heart, was kept a hero to the universal imagination, whether of scholar or peasant, and a white ideal of manly purity and grace to that great faculty of taste which is the umpire and arbiter of the human mind.