Shadows of the Stage | Page 6

Mrs.
Siddons, he said, was incomparable, and the elder Mathews a great
genius,--the precursor of Dickens. For Edmund Kean he had no
enthusiasm. Kean, he said, was at his best in Sir Edward Mortimer, and
after that in Shylock. Miss O'Neill he remembered as the perfect Juliet:
a beautiful, blue-eyed woman, who could easily weep, and who
retained her beauty to the last, dying at 85, as Lady Wrixon Becher.
[Footnote 1: This paper was written in 1888, and now, in 1892, Mr.
Jefferson, Mr. Stoddart, Mrs. Drew, and Mrs. Gilbert are the only
survivors of that noble group.]

II.
HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN FAUST.
It is not surprising that the votaries of Goethe's colossal poem--a work
which, although somewhat deformed and degraded with the pettiness of

provincialism, is yet a grand and immortal creation of genius--should
find themselves dissatisfied with theatrical expositions of it. Although
dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly
dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being
radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction. More
disastrous still, in the eyes of those votaries, it cannot be and it never
has been converted into a play without a considerable sacrifice of its
contents, its comprehensive scope, its poetry, and its ethical
significance. In the poem it is the Man who predominates; it is not the
Fiend. Mephistopheles, indeed, might, for the purpose of philosophical
apprehension, be viewed as an embodied projection of the mind of
Faust; for the power of the one is dependent absolutely upon the
weakness and surrender of the other. The object of the poem was the
portrayal of universal humanity in a typical form at its highest point of
development and in its representative spiritual experience. Faust, an
aged scholar, the epitome of human faculties and virtues, grand,
venerable, beneficent, blameless, is passing miserably into the evening
of life. He has done no outward and visible wrong, and yet he is
wretched. The utter emptiness of his life--its lack of fulfilment, its lack
of sensation--wearies, annoys, disgusts, and torments him. He is
divided between an apathy, which heavily weighs him down into the
dust, and a passionate, spiritual longing, intense, unsatisfied, insatiable,
which almost drives him to frenzy. Once, at sunset, standing on a
hillside, and looking down upon a peaceful valley, he utters, in a poetic
strain of exquisite tenderness and beauty, the final wish of his forlorn
and weary soul. It is no longer now the god-like aspiration and
imperious desire of his prime, but it is the sufficient alternative. All he
asks now is that he may see the world always as in that sunset vision, in
the perfection of happy rest; that he may be permitted, soaring on the
wings of the spirit, to follow the sun in its setting ("The day before me
and the night behind"), and thus to circle forever round and round this
globe, the ecstatic spectator of happiness and peace. He has had enough
and more than enough of study, of struggle, of unfulfilled aspiration.
Lonely dignity, arid renown, satiety, sorrow, knowledge without hope,
and age without comfort,--these are his present portion; and a little way
onward, waiting for him, is death. Too old to play with passion, too
young not to feel desire, he has endured a long struggle between the

two souls in his breast--one longing for heaven and the other for the
world; but he is beaten at last, and in the abject surrender of despair he
determines to die by his own act. A childlike feeling, responsive in his
heart to the divine prompting of sacred music, saves him from
self-murder; but in a subsequent bitter revulsion he utters a curse upon
everything in the state of man, and most of all upon that celestial
attribute of patience whereby man is able to endure and to advance in
the eternal process of evolution from darkness into light. And now it is,
when the soul of the human being, utterly baffled by the mystery of
creation, crushed by its own hopeless sorrow, and enraged by the
everlasting command to renounce and refrain, has become one delirium
of revolt against God and destiny, that the spirit of perpetual denial,
incarnated in Mephistopheles, steps forth to proffer guidance and help.
It is as if his rejection and defiance had suddenly become embodied, to
aid him in his ruin. More in recklessness than in trust, with no fear,
almost with scorn and contempt, he yet agrees to accept this assistance.
If happiness be really possible, if the true way, after all, should lie in
the life of the senses, and not in knowledge and reason; if, under the
ministrations of this fiend, one hour of life, even one moment of it,