Chapter 65

My father had found it expedient, in this mode of illustrating Shakespeare, to make one play the subject of each reading; taking two hours for the performance, and dividing the piece as fairly as possible in two parts; retaining the whole _story_ of the play, and so much only of the wisdom and beauty bestowed on its development by the author, as could be kept well within the two hours' delivery, and make the reading resemble as nearly as possible, in dramatic effect, the already garbled and coarsely mutilated stage plays the general public are alone familiar with. I was grievously disappointed, but could not help myself. In Germany I should have had no such difficulty; but the German public is willing to take its amusements in earnest.

The readings were to be my livelihood, and I had to adapt them to the audiences who paid for them--

"For those who live to please, must please to live."

I gladly availed myself of my father's reading version of the plays, and read those he had delivered, cut and prepared for the purpose according to that. When I came to cut and prepare for reading the much greater number which I read, and he did not, I found the task a very difficult one; and was struck with the judgment and taste with which my father had performed it. I do not think it possible to have adapted these compositions better or more successfully to the purposes for which he required them. But I was determined, at least, not to limit my repertory to the few most theatrically popular of Shakespeare's dramas, but to include in my course _all_ Shakespeare's plays that it was possible to read with any hope of attracting or interesting an audience. My father had limited his range to a few of the most frequently acted plays. I delivered the following twenty-four: King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, King John, Richard II., two parts of Henry IV., Henry V., Richard III., Henry VIII., Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest.

These plays I read invariably through once before repeating any of them; partly to make such of them as are seldom or never acted, familiar to the public, by delivering them alternately with those better known; and partly to avoid, what I much dreaded, becoming mechanical or hackneyed myself in their delivery by perpetual repetition of the same pieces, and so losing any portion of the inspiration of my text by constant iteration of those garbled versions of it, from which so much of its nobler and finer elements are of hard necessity omitted in such a process as my reading of them. I persisted in this system for my own "soul's sake," and not to debase my work more than was inevitable, to the very considerable detriment of my gains.

The public _always_ came in goodly numbers to hear "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and "The Merchant of Venice;" and Mendelssohn's exquisite music, made an accompaniment to the reading of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," rendered that a peculiarly popular performance. But to _all_ the other plays the audiences were considerably less numerous, and to some few of them I often had but few listeners. Mr. Mitchell, who for a considerable length of time _farmed_ my readings, protested bitterly against this system, which involved, of course, less profits than he might have made by repeating only the most popular plays; and my own agents, when I was reading on my own account, did not fail to represent to me that I was what they called sacrificing my interests, _i.e._ my receipts, to this plan of operations; but man does not live by bread alone, and for more than twenty years that I followed the trade of a wandering rhapsodist, I never consciously sacrificed my sense of what was due to my work, for the sake of what I could make by it. I have wished, and hoped, and prayed, that I might be able to use my small gift _dutifully_; and to my own profound feeling of the _virtue_ of these noble works, have owed whatever power I found to interpret them. My great reward has been, passing a large portion of my life in familiar intercourse with that greatest and best English mind and heart, and living almost daily in that world above the world, into which he lifted me. One inspiration alone could have been purer or higher; and to that, my earthly master's work, done as well as it was in me to do it, often helped, and from it, never hindered me.]

29, KING STREET, Saturday, February 19th.

_Imprimis_, will you and Dorothy fasten your dinner-napkins with these things, or rings, which I have made for you? for my imagination is sick with the memory of those bits of strings you use. I have made these too short, and so have been obliged to put strings to them, having originally intended them to be complete rounds; but my needle performances are always ill-managed and untidy, and as such I commend these to your indulgent acceptance. I wrought at them those bitter evenings that I spent in those barns of theatres in Norfolk, where the occupation contributed to entertain the warmth of my heart, which was all the heat I had to keep me alive....

I must tell you rather a droll observation of the worthy Hayes. When I explained to her that I had made those worsted bands to fasten your dinner-napkins, for which you had nothing but strings, she said, "Dear me! I wonder at that! And Miss S---- seemed so fond of clever, curious contrivances, for everything." I screamed with delight when she said that, for hadn't I cursed that "curious contrivance" of an inkstand you gave me (Dorothy cursed hers too, no doubt, after her own blessed fashion)? and didn't I curse that execrable "curious contrivance" of a taper you gave me at St. Leonard's, with which I was so enchanted _before I used it_, and which wasted me by its own small fire every time I did use it, and for the final burning out of which I was so thankful? But are not Hayes's comments on your character comical?

I am sorry to say I have not the same dressing-room I had before at the Princess's Theatre. Mr. Macready is quite too great a man to give it up to anybody, and my attiring apartment now is up a steep flight of stairs, which is a great discomfort to me on several grounds, for I fear the call-boy will hardly come so far out of his way to summon me, and I shall have to sit in the greenroom, which, however, I won't, if I can by any means avoid it; but the proximity of the other room to the stage, and its being on the same level with it, was a great advantage.

I am going to dine with Lady Grey (the Countess, widow of _the_ Lord Grey), and after that to the opera with Henry Greville and Alfred Potocki, who have a box, and have given me a ticket, which I am very glad of.

I had a three hours' rehearsal this morning, and Macready was there. As far as I could judge, he was less unfair in his mode of acting than I had been led to expect. To be sure, at night, he may stand two yards behind me while I am speaking to him, as I am told he often does. He is not courteous or pleasant, or even well-bred; remains seated while one is standing talking to him; and a discussion having arisen as to the situation of a table, which he wished on the stage, and I wished removed, he exhibited considerable irritability and ill-humor.

He is unnecessarily violent in acting, which I had always heard, and congratulated myself that in Lady Macbeth, I could not possibly suffer from this; but was much astonished and dismayed when at the exclamation, "Bring forth men-children only," he seized me ferociously by the wrist, and compelled me to make a demivolte, or pirouette, such as I think that lady did surely never perform before, under the influence of her husband's admiration.

God bless you, dear,

Ever yours, FANNY.

[I have always had a cordial esteem and respect for Mr. Macready's character, which has been increased by reading the record he has himself left of his life. Of his merits as an actor, I had not a very high opinion, though in one or two parts he was excellent, and in the majority of the tragical ones he assumed, better than his contemporaries, my father, Charles Young, and Charles Kean. He was disqualified for sentimental tragedy by his appearance, and he was without comic power of any kind. _Parts_ of his Macbeth, Lear, Othello, and King John, were powerful and striking, but his want of musical ear made his delivery of Shakespeare's blank-verse defective, and painful to persons better endowed in that respect. It may have been his consciousness of his imperfect declamation of blank-verse that induced him to adopt what his admirers called the natural style of speaking it; which was simply chopping it up into prose--a method easily followed by speakers who have never learned the difference between the two, and that blank-verse demands the same care and method that music does, and when not uttered with due regard to its artificial construction, and rules of rhythm and measure, is precisely as faulty as music sung out of time.

The school of "natural speaking" reached its climax, I presume, in the performance of a charming young actress, of whose delivery of the poetry of Portia it was said in high commendation, by her admirers, that she gave the blank verse so _naturally_ that it was impossible to tell that it was not _prose_. What she did with Shakespeare's _prose_ in the part these judicious critics did not mention.

Mr. Macready's eye was as sensitive and cultivated as his ear was the reverse. He had a painter's feeling for color and grouping and scenic effect; was always picturesque in his appearance, dress, attitudes, and movements; and all the pieces that were put upon the stage under his supervision were admirable for the appropriate harmony of the scenery, decorations, dresses, and whole effect; they were carefully accurate, and extremely beautiful. "Acis and Galatea," as produced under his direction, was one of the most exquisite dramatic spectacles I ever saw, in spite of the despair to which he reduced the chorus and ballet nymphs by rigorously forbidding all padding, bustle, crinoline, or other artificial adjunct to their natural graces, in the severely simple classical costume of the Greek mythological opera.

Mr. Macready's great parts were Virginius, in Knowles's play of that name; Werner, in Lord Byron's romantic drama; and Rob Roy, in the melodrama taken from Scott's novel. These were original performances, in which nobody has surpassed or equalled him; genuine artistic creations, which, more than his rendering of Shakespeare's characters, entitled him to his reputation as a great actor.

He was unpopular in the profession, his temper was irritable, and his want of consideration for the persons working with him strange in a man of so many fine qualities. His artistic vanity and selfishness were unworthy of a gentleman, and rendered him an object of dislike and dread to those who were compelled to encounter them.

He was quite aware of this himself, for once, when he came to see me, while the negotiation was pending about my engagement to act with him, he alluded to his own unpopularity, said he was sure I had heard all sorts of disagreeable stories about him, but assured me, laughing, that "the devil was not nearly so black as he was painted."

It was quite impossible for me to tell Mr. Macready that I had heard he was _pleasant_ to act with, remembering, as I did while he spoke to me, the various accounts I had received of actors whose eyes had been all but thrust out by his furious fighting in Macbeth; of others nearly throttled in his paternal vengeance on Appius Claudius; of actresses whose arms had been almost wrenched out of their sockets, and who had been bruised black and blue, buffeted alike by his rage and his tenderness. One special story I thought of, and was dying to tell him, of one pretty and spirited young woman, who had said, "I am told Mr. Macready, in such a part, gets hold of one's head, and holds it in chancery under his arm, while he speaks a long speech, at the end of which he releases one, more dead than alive, from his embrace; but I shall put so many pins in my hair, and stick them in in such a fashion, that if he takes me by the head, he will have to let me instantly go again."

My personal experience of Macready's stage temper was not so bad as this, though he began by an act of unwarrantable selfishness in our performance of "Macbeth."

From time immemorial, the banquet scene in "Macbeth" has been arranged after one invariable fashion: the royal dais and throne, with the steps leading up to it, holds the middle of the stage, sufficiently far back to allow of two long tables, at which the guests are seated on each side, in front of it, leaving between them ample space for Macbeth's scene with Banquo's ghost, and Lady Macbeth's repeated rapid descents from the dais and return to it, in her vehement expostulations with him, and her courteous invitations to the occupants of both the tables to "feed, and regard him not." Accustomed to this arrangement of the stage, which I never saw different anywhere in all my life for this scene, I was much astonished and annoyed to find, at my first rehearsal, a long banqueting-table set immediately at the foot of the steps in front of the dais, which rendered all but impossible my rapid rushing down to the front of the stage, in my terrified and indignant appeals to Macbeth, and my sweeping back to my place, addressing on my way my compliments to the tables on either side. It was as much as I could do to pass between the bottom of the throne steps and the end of the transverse table in front of them; my train was in danger of catching its legs and my legs, and throwing it down and me down, and the whole thing was absolutely ruinous to the proper performance of my share of the scene. If such a table had been in any such place in Glamis Castle on that occasion, when Macbeth was seized with his remorseful frenzies, his wife would have jumped over or overturned it to get at him.

All my remonstrances, however, were in vain. Mr. Macready persisted in his determination to have the stage arranged solely with reference to himself, and I was obliged to satisfy myself with a woman's vengeance, a snappish speech, by at last saying that, since it was evident Mr. Macready's Macbeth depended upon where a table stood, I must contrive that my Lady Macbeth should not do so. But in that scene it undoubtedly did.

As I had been prepared for this sort of thing in Macready, it didn't surprise me; but what did was a conversation I had with him about "Othello," when he expressed his astonishment at my being willing to play Desdemona; "For," said he, "there is absolutely nothing to be done with it, nothing: nobody can produce any effect in it; and really, Emilia's last scene can be made a great deal more of. I could understand your playing that, but not Desdemona, out of which nothing really can be made." "But," said I, "Mr. Macready, it is Shakespeare, and no character of Shakespeare's is beneath my acceptance. I would play Maria in 'Twelfth Night' to-morrow, if I were asked to do so." Whereupon he shrugged his shoulders, and muttered something about "all that being very fine, no doubt," but evidently didn't believe me; and as I should have given him credit for my own feeling with regard to any character in Shakespeare's plays, I was as much surprised at his thinking I should refuse to act any one of them as I was at his coarse and merely technical acting estimate of that exquisite Desdemona, of which, according to him, "nothing could be made;" _i.e._, no violent stage effect could be produced. Is not Shakespeare's refusing to let Desdemona sully her lips with the coarse epithet of reproach with which her husband brands her, and which no lady in England of his day would have hesitated a moment to use, a wonderful touch of delicacy?

Macready certainly was aware of the feeling of his fellow-actors about his violence and want of personal self-control on the stage; for as he stood at the side scene by me, in the last act of "King Lear," ready to rush on with me, his Cordelia, dead in his arms, he made various prefatory and preparatory excuses to me, deprecating beforehand my annoyance at being dragged and pulled about after his usual fashion, saying that necessarily the scene was a disagreeable one for the "poor corpse." I had no very agreeable anticipation of it myself, and therefore could only answer, "Some one must play it with you, Mr. Macready, and I feel sure that you will make it as little distressing to me as you can;" which I really believe he intended to do, and thought he did.]

I have received this morning from Liverpool, in answer to my letter about my readings, a very earnest request that I would give _lectures_ upon Shakespeare. This I have declined doing, not having either the requisite knowledge or ability nor the necessary time properly to prepare a careful analysis of the smallest portion of such over-brimming subjects as those plays. I should like to study again Hazlitt's and Coleridge's comments upon Shakespeare; the former I used to think excellent.

Mrs. Grote herself wrote those stanzas upon Mendelssohn which you saw in the _Spectator_. She urged me vehemently, while I was with her at the Beeches, to do something of the kind; but I could not. She then showed me her verses, which please me better now than they did then; for then the painful association of his former existence in that place, and the excitement of his beautiful music, which she plays extremely well, had affected my imagination and feelings so much that I should have found it very difficult to be satisfied with any poetical tribute to him that was not of the very highest order.

She and I walked together to the spot in the beautiful woodland where he had lain down to rest, and where she wishes to erect a monument; and I cannot tell you how profoundly I was touched, as we stood silently there, while the great heavy drops, melting in the winter evening's sunshine, fell from the boughs of the beech-trees like slow tears upon the spot where he had lain.

I have read more of Stanley's "Sermons," and quite agree with you in the difference you draw between them and Mr. Furness's book; the spirit of both is kindred....

I don't know anything about the income-tax. I am getting frightfully behind the times, having read no _Times_ for a long time; but as regards income-tax, or any other tax, there is no telling how long one may be free from such galls in America. If they indulge in a few more such national diversions as this war in Mexico, they will have to pay for their whistle, in some shape or other, and in more shapes than one.

It is deplorable to hear the despondency of all public and political men that I see, with regard to the condition of the country. With the Tories, one has long been familiar with their cries that "the sky is falling:" but now the Liberals, at least those who all their lives have been professing Liberals, seem to think "the sky is falling" too; and their lamentable misgivings are really sad to listen to.

I dined on Saturday at Lady Grey's, with the whole Grey family. Lord Dacre, and all of them, spoke of Cobden and Bright as of another Danton and Mirabeau, likened their corn-law league, and peace protests, to the first measures of the first leaders of the French Revolution; and predicted with woful headshakings a similar end to their proceedings. I do not know whether this is an injustice to the individuals in question, but it seems to me an injustice to the whole people of England collectively, and to their own class, the aristocracy of England, which has incurred no such retribution, but which has invariably furnished liberal and devoted leaders to every step of popular progress--their own father an eminent instance of devotion to it. Such misgivings seem to me, too, quite unjust to the powerful, enlightened, and wealthy class which forms the sound body of our sound-hearted nation: and equally unjust to those below it, in whom, in spite of much vice and more ignorance, of poverty and degradation, the elements of evil do not exist in the degree and with the virulence that spawned that hideous mob of murderers who became at last the only government of revolutionary France. The antecedent causes have not existed here for such results; and it is an insult to the whole English people to prophesy thus of it.

[Lord Dacre, because of his devotion to the agricultural interest, as he conceives it, and being himself a great practical farmer, seemed to me at once, at the time of the repeal of the corn laws, to renounce his Liberalism; and though one of the most enlightened, generous, and broad-minded politicians I have ever known, _till then_, to become suddenly timid, faithless, and almost selfish, in his fear of the consequences of Sir Robert Peel's measures.]

What a fine thing faith in God is, even when one's own individual interests must perish, even though the temporary interests of one's country may appear threatened with adversity! What an _uncommonly_ fine thing it is under such circumstances to do right, and to be able to believe in right doing!... As I listened to the persons by whom I was surrounded, and considered their position and circumstances--their forks and spoons, their very good dinner, and all their etceteras of luxury and enjoyment,--I thought that, having all they have, if they had faith in God and in their fellow-creatures besides, they would have the portion of those who have none of the good things of this world--they would have too much.

Will the days ever come when men will see that _Christ_ believed in humanity as none of His followers has ever done since; that _He_, knowing its infirmity better than any other, trusted in its capacity for good more than any other? We are constantly told that people can't be taught this, and can't learn that, and can't do t'other; and _He_ taught them nothing short of absolute perfection: "Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." Are we to suppose He did not mean what he said?

"I must eat my dinner," as Caliban says, and, therefore, farewell.

I am ever yours, FANNY.

P.S.--I did not impart these sentiments of mine to my fellow-guests at Lady Grey's, but kept them in my bosom, and went to the opera, and saw little Marie Taglioni dance, in a way that clearly shows that she is _la nièce de sa tante_, and stands in that wonderful dancer's shoes.

KING STREET, Wednesday, 23d, 1848.