Shadows of the Stage | Page 9

word implies, and in doing that he not only heeded the fine instinct of the true actor but the splendid teaching of the highest poetry--the ray of supernal light that flashes from the old Hebrew Bible; the blaze that streams from the Paradise Lost; the awful glory through which, in the pages of Byron, the typical figure of agonised but unconquerable revolt towers over a realm of ruin:--
"On his brow The thunder-scars are graven; from his eye Glares forth the immortality of hell."
Ellen Terry, in her assumption of Margaret, once more displayed that profound, comprehensive, and particular knowledge of human love--that knowledge of it through the soul and not simply the mind--which is the source of her exceptional and irresistible power. This Margaret was a woman who essentially loves, who exists only for love, who has the courage of her love, who gives all for love--not knowing that it is a sacrifice--and whose love, at last, triumphant over death, is not only her own salvation but that also of her lover. The point of strict conformity to the conception of the poet, in physique and in spiritual state, may be waived. Goethe's Margaret is a handsome, hardy girl, of humble rank, who sometimes uses bad grammar and who reveals no essential mind. She is just a delicious woman, and there is nothing about her either metaphysical or mysterious. The wise Fiend, who knows that with such a man as Faust the love of such a woman must outweigh all the world, wisely tempts him with her, and infernally lures him to the accomplishment of her ruin. But it will be observed that, aside from the infraction of the law of man, the loves of Faust and Margaret are not only innocent but sacred. This sanctity Mephistopheles can neither pollute nor control, and through this he loses his victims. Ellen Terry's Margaret was a delicious woman, and not metaphysical nor mysterious; but it was Margaret imbued with the temperament of Ellen Terry,--who, if ever an exceptional creature lived, is exceptional in every particular. In her embodiment she transfigured the character: she maintained it in an ideal world, and she was the living epitome of all that is fascinating in essential womanhood--glorified by genius. It did not seem like acting but like the revelation of a hallowed personal experience upon which no chill worldly gaze should venture to intrude.
In that suggestive book in which Lady Pollock records her recollections of Macready it is said that once, after his retirement, on reading a London newspaper account of the production of a Shakespearean play, he remarked that "evidently the accessories swallow up the poetry and the action": and he proceeded, in a reminiscent and regretful mood, to speak as follows: "In my endeavour to give to Shakespeare all his attributes, to enrich his poetry with scenes worthy of its interpretation, to give to his tragedies their due magnificence and to his comedies their entire brilliancy, I have set an example which is accompanied with great peril, for the public is willing to have the magnificence without the tragedy, and the poet is swallowed up in display." Mr. Irving is the legitimate successor to Macready and he has encountered that same peril. There are persons--many of them--who think that it is a sign of weakness to praise cordially and to utter admiration with a free heart. They are mistaken, but no doubt they are sincere. Shakespeare, the wisest of monitors, is never so eloquent and splendid as when he makes one of his people express praise of another. Look at those speeches in Coriolanus. Such niggardly persons, in their detraction of Henry Irving, are prompt to declare that he is a capital stage manager but not a great actor. This has an impartial air and a sapient sound, but it is gross folly and injustice. Henry Irving is one of the greatest actors that have ever lived, and he has shown it over and over again. His acting is all the more effective because associated with unmatched ability to insist and insure that every play shall be perfectly well set, in every particular, and that every part in it shall be competently acted. But his genius and his ability are no more discredited than those of Macready were by his attention to technical detail and his insistence upon total excellence of result. It should be observed, however, that he has carried stage garniture to an extreme limit. His investiture of Faust was so magnificent that possibly it may have tended in the minds of many spectators, to obscure and overwhelm the fine intellectual force, the beautiful delicacy, and the consummate art with which he embodied Mephistopheles. It ought not to have produced that effect--because, in fact, the spectacle presented was, actually and truly, that of