The Galaxy/Volume 5/Number 2/Some of our Actors
SOME OF OUR ACTORS.
IT is often claimed that the acting of the present day is more genuine and natural than that of former generations, and that the modern stage, breaking up the old conventional models, has sent the actor to nature instead of tradition for his authority and inspiration. But it is a great mistake to confound the "free-and-easy" style of our day with that which we call "nature,"—a style immeasurably inferior to that consummate art which conceals art, and which was once the grace and glory of the stage. It is not enough for the dramatic art to imitate nature. "Let us have on the stage men and women just as we find them off the stage," is the current demand. Art is not imitation. If it were merely that, a wax figure in a pea-jacket would be finer than the Greek Slave.
"I have met," said a veteran poet in my hearing once, "a good many actors who could spell, some who could write, but very few who could read." A finished delivery is rare, indeed—that nice and accurate lodgment of emphasis, with the proper inflections, giving each word its due prominence and relation to every other. It illuminates the author and sets his meaning, as it were, on a hill; it renders even indifferent passages luminous, eloquent, and full of expression. Those who have heard Ellen Tree read "She never told her love," will know what I mean.
A "pre-Raphaelite realism," in the nonsensical cant in fashion with some people, is claimed for the modern actors, which the elder schools did not exhibit. What is this "realism?" When, a few years ago, Matilda Heron was turning the heads of the town, we all heard extravagant praise of her realism, her "truth," her "fidelity to nature." Yet the stage never saw a more artificial actor, intensely elaborate, full of poses, and full of mannerisms. We found her out in time, and she is now coldly neglected. She lacked the old-time professional art. She was only successful in a few rôles in which her peculiar talent and individuality had scope; her triumphs were measured by the range of her genius and limited by the incompleteness of her art. Her Camille was a great success, because she really employed in it a very consummate art—unfortunately, however, it was borrowed. For a hundred nights, she watched a famous Parisian actress in the part, and reproduced every detail of her model's business.
There is trickery enough in many modern reputations. Suppose that I am small, that I am wiry, that my voice is thin and poor but I discover I can beat all the world in laughing and crying. I have a play written with abundance of opportunity to cry and laugh from the rising of the curtain to the going down thereof Everybody exclaims: "What natural crying! What natural laughing!" Miss Maggie Mitchell's Fanchon is a very clever bit of acting; but why call it a representation of the "realistic" school? Why the real Fanchon, no doubt, had soiled fingers, teeth guiltless of Sozodont, and used very bad grammar. Fanchon is just as much an ideal as Juliet or Rosalind. But this method of fitting a character to one's idiosyncracies was not the old idea of the art, and there is no telling what end of geniuses we might have developed had this Yankee trick been discovered a century earlier. An actor, according to the old idea, was one whose art enabled him to create distinct and separate individualities, and was not limited to the reproduction of himself. It was the actor's study to enter into and embody the creations of the dramatist, and not order the author to individualize his character to the measure of the performer.
Modern comedy acting is usually a bright, brisk, touch-and-go affair, suited to modern plays; but to the mellow and artistic style of a former generation, it is as the light claret wines, now so much in use, to crusty old port. Mere facility in off-hand dialogue will not fit an actor for the old comedy. There is no form of dramatic expression so rare to find as genuine gayety.
Mr. Lester Wallack is the best of our light comedians. He has a captivating brilliancy of touch, and supreme elegance of manner. He cannot, however, depict genuine gayety, and is forced to substitute for it a sort of refined antic and humorous grimace. His greatest successes in comedy have been in parts like that of Littleton Coke (in Old Heads and Young Hearts), where a light, blasémanner, keen satire, and brisk dialogue, are required. Like all of his family, Mr. Wallack has profound dramatic perceptions, and consequently great talent for the romantic drama. In Monte Christo, the mysterious Count in Pauline, and in certain portions of Melnotte in the Lady of Lyons, he is the most brilliantly picturesque actor on the stage. Much of this power depends on his resources of dress, in which he exhibits a marvellous talent. His "get-up" is usually superb. In that field he is master almost without a rival. His fondness for the picturesque or romantic drama is very decided, and he is reported to have said that he would take pleasure in acting the Count in Pauline three hundred nights in a year.
But gayety was my text. The want of an actor who can adequately express it excludes from the stage Young Rover, Young Mirabel, and many kindred parts. Who can sustain these delicious rôles where the gay humors sparkle and dance in glorious exhilaration from first to last? I would go far to see Mirabel acted once more. The situation in the last act—it is Farquhar's Inconstant—is one of the most dramatic and thrilling on the stage, and combines a wild mirth with passionate intensity that any actor may well shrink from attempting. Murdoch has found favor in the part before a London audience. But Murdoch, with more true mirth than, perhaps, any of his compeers, has not that refined and brilliant lightness of manner, that grace, which I have described elsewhere as snuffing a candle in a way to make you feel that snuffing candles is the poetry of life, or taking snuff with a grace to witch the world with snuff taking. Who can act Benedick? Charles Kean, a shrivelled old man of sixty, who looked no more like Benedick than a dried herring, gave us by sheer art the best Benedick of many a year. Twenty years ago Mrs. Kean was a Beatrice worthy of the part, an actress of true gayety; and her merry, rollicking laugh, which used to set the house in a sympathetic roar, yet lingers delightfully in my ears. There is not an actress on our stage who can express the gayety of Beatrice, or point Beatrice's wit. Where, again, is there a Rosalind, or a Viola? Whoever has seen Ellen Tree as Rosalind, will echo this question with regret.
We have lately lost from the stage the charming Madeline Henriques—not a great actress, but one with a tasteful, finished, society manner, without pretence or affectation, and full of gentleness, grace, and feeling. Even she was incapable of Rosalind, or Viola, or of any ripe and truly intellectual part. She appeared best in quietly-earnest characters, and had more pathos than comedy. Her delicate and refined rendering was healthful for the art; and her marriage, in ending her theatrical career, caused an unusual loss to the American stage.
Madeline Henriques is not the only one of our modern actors who, charming in little society parts, would be lost in the rich old drama. Of all the Wallack company only one member catches the spirit of the old comedies—notwithstanding Mr. Wallack's persistent attempts to revive them—and this is Mr. John Gilbert. He has a sound, thorough drill, and that perfect knowledge of the traditions of the art which are necessary to old English comedy. Gilbert has scarcely the unction of the late Mr. Blake in Sir Anthony Absolute, nor the perfect finish of Placide in Sir Peter Teazle, but his range of parts is wider than that of either of those excellent actors. Mr. Wallack ought to produce Henry IV., just to show, what few know, that Mr. Gilbert's is the best Falstaff on the stage. It has more breadth, richer coloring, more unctuous mellowness than Hackett's, which, by excessive elaboration, is weakened in vigor and freedom. But Hackett is an admirable actor. His Sir Pertinax MacSycophant, in The Man of the World, is a perfect study. and exhibits a Scotchman of the world in colors supremely vivid, His Rip Van Winkle is far nearer the ordinary conception of that good-for-nothing Dutchman than Mr. Jefferson's, whose performance s praised so much for its naturalness. Jefferson is natural, refined full of delicate perceptions, but he is in nowise the real Rip of Irving's story. Jefferson, indeed, is a good example of our modern art. His naturalness, his unaffected methods, his susceptible temperament, his subtleties of humor and pathos, are appreciated and applauded; yet his want of breadth and tone, sometimes renders his performances feeble and flavorless.
Let us not forget Harry Placide, that glorious old actor, now on the Long Island shore, who consents to forget, in sea-side sports, his early triumphs and a long-admiring public. I wish he would occasionally revisit the glimpses of the footlights, just to remind us how Sir Peter Teazle or Sir Harcourt Courtly ought to be acted. With him, probably, will pass away even the tradition of those parts. In his Sir Peter was exhibited a consummate art of which the more modern stage gives us but few examples. It was the ideal of an English gentleman of the olden time. When Placide and Gilbert are gone, Sheridan will have to be shelved.
Among all our actors there is none, in my judgment, who exhibits such power of imagination as Mr. James W. Wallack. Unfortunately, this great qualification is marred by mannerisms, and sometimes by extravagance. He is most effective in very salient parts; and nothing on the American stage is so intense in dramatic expression and characterization as his Werner, Gisippus, Melantius (in The Bridal), and the Iron Mask. He has many stage tricks, is apt to play idly with his voice, is angular in gesture, and not always natural in delivery. But he flings into his part a vivid imagination and passionate intensity of feeling that outweigh a thousand faults. Macready, faulty in the same respects, reached the head of the English stage. Wallack's style, moreover, mellows by time, and his performance last Winter of The Dangerous Game, by its grand reserve and artistic finish, disarms much of the censure just pronounced. In his Henry Dunbar the actor seems translated into the character. Wallack has the family insight into the picturesque resources of the art. His Richard III. is unlike any other actor's conception of the part; but that fine old actor, Mr. Barry, once said of it that "if played in London, it would be a great success or as great a failure." Of late years he has avoided the part. His Shylock is also a very original performance, and is worthy of being revived, for comparison with Booth's.
Mr. Booth is a born Hamlet. His youthful figure, graceful deportment, melancholy bearing, pale and intellectual face, large, ruminating eye, supply all the external requirements of the character, while his tender pathos, his power of passionate expression, united with his refinement of taste, susceptible temperament and sympathetic appreciation, render him the Hamlet of Hamlets. He exercises, too, a sort of magnetic power over the majority of his auditors, which bars criticism on their part. He is sometimes crude, sometimes does not even accomplish what is technically known as "filling the stage." In Hamlet this is not apparent; but in Richelieu it renders the performance bald. Mr. Booth does not always give to language its full force of meaning. His emphasis is sometimes misplaced; his inflections not always sufficiently marked; his reading does not always do justice to the meaning of his author. He is much too prone to lodge his emphasis on pronouns and prepositions, neglecting what elocutionists call slur, by which insignificant words are touched lightly and trippingly. He often declaims in an elevated monotone, without any flexibility, and hence fails to give to a passage its just expression. But his voice is often very tender and sweet, as his rendering of "This was your husband," in the closet scene in Hamlet, testifies.
It is as a reader that Mr. Booth is chiefly faulty; but in Hamlet he may be justly chargeable with failing to get the "antic disposition on." In the interview with his father's spirit, Hamlet has caught terrible glimpses of the nether world. Grief, horror, awe, passionate sympathy, excited by the unearthly visitation—what language can express the tumult of these sensations! Strained beyond measure, his whole nature rebounds into unnatural mirth. "Ha, ha, boy, say'st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny? Come on. You hear this fellow in the cellarage!" "Well said, old mole! Canst thou work in the earth so fast?" So does the distraught prince break out into ribaldry and phantasy of mirth. In Mr. Booth's rendering of these words, there is nothing of the tumultuous passion they reveal, no frenzy, no glimpse of intense passion covered, but not hidden, by a wild and feverish mirth. The words are, indeed, "wild and whirling," but their utterance is not. All through the play Mr. Booth puts Hamlet in the most studied and elaborated "antic disposition " possible.
In the closing soliloquy of the second act, Hamlet's pent-up passion finds adequate vent in words. Strangely stirred by the declamation of the travelling actor, and hastily dismissing him, and his faithless friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he bursts into the most passionate self upbraiding. All his conflicting emotions rush pell-mell into expression. Look at the language : "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I?" "This is meet, that I … must unlock my heart with words, and fall a cursing like a very drab, a scullion!" "Bloody, bloody villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!" Mr. Booth does not utter this speech with the passionate flow and vehemence it requires. When I first heard him deliver it, he attitudinized, declaimed, broke his words up into syllables, and failed to fire the speech with genuine passion; the second time he uttered it flowingly, but in a discursive, rambling fashion, still lacking the passionate abandon which should characterize it. It is a difficult speech to render, and the actors used to omit it.
But, indeed, how rare and wonderful are the qualities necessary for a successful Hamlet—in whom imagination, philosophy, strange observation, keen sensibility, deep sorrow, yearning aspiration, subtle speculation, melancholy brooding, masculine passions, feminine delicacy, are all united!
Having spoken so much of Mr. Booth's Hamlet, let us say a word about Mr. Forrest's. We must take Forrest's Hamlet through the ear, and not the eye. Do not look at him, but hear him only. He acts the part very quietly; in fact scarcely acts it at all; he simply reads it delightfully. His rendering of the soliloquies is a study. Forrest in his Gladiator, his Damon, his Cade is far from agreeable; but he is great in a few parts, and in those, it so happens, in which he is the least popular. His Richelieu is much more artistic, complete, finished and satisfactory than Booth's. His Coriolanus is also a finished, and, barring some of his peculiar mannerisms, a very fine, performance. As for the charge of ranting commonly brought against him, he is at times burly and rough, but in fact does not rant any more than Booth. Mr. Forrest, with all his sins, would never render a part as Booth does Shylock, in which there is a loud strain of the voice from the beginning to the end. When Dawison, the great German artist, was playing Othello here last Winter, some of the critics highly commended his rendering of what is known as the "handkerchief scene," which he uttered with subdued pathos and agonizing apprehension, instead of in the boisterous manner most of the actors render it. The critics did not seem to know that Dawison's method of acting the scene is not new, Mr. Forrest having long since presented it.
Among our careful, earnest, and satisfactory actors is Mr. Davenport. He began his career at the Old Bowery in comic Yankee parts; was taken up by Mrs. Mowatt to play leading parts with her; went to England, and gained much reputation. His manner is hard, and there is something of the Yankee twang yet in his utterance; still, few of our actors have sounder judgment, or a more thorough mastery of his art.
I passed over the Wallack company without alluding to excellent Mrs. Vernon, one of the relics of the old Park. She is so nearly blind now that, though her familiarity with the stage renders it quite possible for her to get through her part when once on it, it is necessary to guide her to the entrance and receive her as she exits. She hardly suits some of the new parts in which she is cast; but in the Malaprops and lively widows of the old comedy, she is unapproachable. Mrs. Vernon was an elderly lady twenty-five years ago, and it is sometimes jocosely stated that the record of her birth was lost in the deluge. And in this same company is Holland, the veteran of the veterans. What a fine, green old age is his! Holland can be more intensely funny than any man on the stage. He is scarcely so successful in sustained parts as in eccentric bits; and he has the art to take a character for which the author has done nothing, and render it one of the telling features of the play. There is not an item of dress, nor a gesture, nor an expression, nor an attitude that is not considered and sustained with conscientious care.
When Booth was playing Hamlet for a hundred nights, Mrs. James Wallack acted the Queen. It was an artistic study. Mrs. Wallack as Anne Waring was a great favorite, and her Elvira in Pizarro was considered remarkable. She is a fine artist, but acts but little, preferring no doubt, the retirement and rural repose of her husband's country seat at Long Branch.
Miss Bateman is cold, statuesque and monotonous, and depends for success upon occasional electrical bursts of intense passion. As with Booth, her personal appearance has much to do with her success. Like him, she has no mastery of delivery. She would find it impossible to successfully cope with one of Shakespeare's intellectual women.
We cannot pay our compliments to all our actors, but it would be a grievous offence to omit mention of genial John Brougham. The excellent "J. B." insists now on playing only in his own dramas, but it is more satisfactory to think of him as stolid Jack Bunsby, or glorious Joe Bagstock, or dashing Sir Lucius O'Trigger. In each of these he was inimitable. Of all our Irish actors, he has been the only one who could act the Irish gentleman; and the Rivals, without Mr. Brougham as Sir Lucius, is difficult to endure. Mr. B. writes a brilliant extravaganza, and acts burlesque in a broad, rollicking, highly enjoyable way. He would do well to revive his burlesque of Metamora, written fifteen or twenty years ago, in which his imitations of Forrest are capital. There is a touch of melancholy in John's countenance now, that was not so before, and he seems to act without that gusto and relish that characterized him in the Chambers Street days with Burton.
Brougham and Stuart, it is said, are to unite in conducting a new theatre on Union Square. It is the third enterprise of the kind we hear of. Where are the actors for so many new ventures? Even Wallack, with a prevailing eagerness all through the profession to act under his management, finds it difficult to select a company suitable for his purpose. There are a great many grand actresses, so we hear, to the right and left of us, and yet where is there one who can unite the breeding of society, the finish of the artist and the beauty of person fitly to succeed Madeline Henriques? When Wallack must go a begging we can hope for no great success with the others. Let us hope the new theatres are not to open upon us an invasion of the provincials. The recently-burned Winter Garden was almost without an actor with the gait, speech or manners of a Christian. The Merchant of Venice, produced with so much lavish pictorial splendor, was never so wretchedly acted on the metropolitan boards. Of course this reference is not to Booth. Madame Scheller, who is at times excellent, was simply ridiculous as Portia—although she read the Plea for Mercy with fine accent and good discretion—and all the others were hopelessly incompetent. We neither desire nor need new theatres merely to afford provincial adventurers an opportunity to exhibit of what poor stuff men and woman are sometimes made.
The French actors are such consummate actors, because they breathe, think, feel, know and live art, and art only. They are born under its domain, live penetrated through and through by its influence, and are infused by a mastering enthusiasm in behalf of it.