Part 2

Mrs. Siddons was born in 1755. She might be said, almost without metaphor, to have been "born on the stage." All the family, I believe, for two or three generations, had been players. In her early life she endured many vicissitudes, and was acquainted with misery and hardship in many repulsive forms. On this subject she had none of the pride of a little mind; but alluded to her former situation with perfect simplicity. The description in Mrs. Inchbald's Memoirs of "Mrs. Siddons singing and mending her children's clothes," is from the life, and charming as well as touching, when we consider her peculiar character and her subsequent destinies. She was in her twenty-first year when she made her first attempt in London, (for it was but an attempt,) in the character of Portia. She also appeared as Lady Anne in Richard III. and in comedy as Mrs. Strickland to Garrick's Ranger. She was not successful: Garrick is said to have been jealous of her rising powers: the public did not discover in her the future tragic muse, and for herself--"She felt that she was greater than she knew." She returned to her provincial career; she spent seven years in patient study, in reflection, in contemplation, and in mastering the practical part of her profession; and then she returned at the age of twenty-eight, and burst upon the world in the prime of her beauty and transcendent powers, with all the attributes of confirmed and acknowledged excellence.

It appears that, in her first season, she did not play one of Shakspeare's characters: she performed Isabella, Euphrasia, Jane Shore, Calista, and Zara. In a visit she paid to Dr. Johnson, at the conclusion of the season, she informed him that it was her intention, the following year, to bring out some of Shakspeare's heroines, particularly Katherine of Arragon, to which she _then_ gave the preference as a character. Dr. Johnson agreed with her, and added that, when she played Katherine, he would hobble to the theatre himself to see her; but he did not live to pay her this tribute of admiration. He, however, paid her another not less valuable: describing his visitor after her departure, he said, "she left nothing behind her to be censured or despised; neither praise nor money, those two powerful corrupters of mankind, seem to have depraved her."[6] In this interview she seems to have pleased the old critic and moralist, who was also a severe and acute judge of human nature, and not inclined to judge favourably of actresses, by the union of modesty with native dignity which at all times distinguished her;--a rare union! and most delightful in those who are the objects of the public gaze, and when the popular enthusiasm is still in all its first intoxicating effervescence.

The first of Shakspeare's characters which Mrs. Siddons performed was Isabella, in Measure for Measure, (1784,) and the next Constance. In the same year Sir Joshua painted her as the tragic Muse.[7] With what a deep interest shall we now visit this her true apotheosis,--now that it has received its last consecration! The rest of Shakspeare's characters followed in this order: Lady Macbeth in 1785, and, soon afterwards, as if by way of contrast, Desdemona, Ophelia, Rosalind. In 1786 she played Imogen; in 1788 Katherine of Arragon; and, in 1789, Volumnia; and in the same season she played Juliet, being then in her thirty-fifth year,--too old for Juliet; nor did this ever become one of her popular parts; she left it to her niece to identify herself for ever with the poetry and sensibility, the youthful grace and fervid passion of Shakspeare's Juliet; and we have as little chance of ever seeing such another Juliet as Fanny Kemble, as of ever seeing such another Lady Macbeth as her magnificent aunt.

A good critic, who was also a great admirer of Mrs. Siddons, asserts that there must be something in acting which levels all poetical distinctions, since people talked in the same breath of her Lady Macbeth and Mrs. Beverley as being equally "fine pieces of acting." I think he is mistaken. No one--no one at least but the most vulgar part of her audience--ever equalized these two characters, even as pieces of acting; or imagined for a moment that the same degree of talent which sufficed to represent Mrs. Beverley could have grasped the towering grandeur of such a character as Lady Macbeth;--dived into its profound and gloomy depths--seized and reflected its wonderful gradations--displayed its magnificence--developed its beauties, and revealed its terrors: no such thing. She might have drawn more tears in Isabella than in Constance--thrown more young ladies into hysterics in Belvidera than in Katherine of Arragon; but all with whom I have conversed on the subject of Mrs. Siddons, are agreed in this;--that her finest characters, as pieces of art, were those which afforded the fullest scope for her powers, and contained in themselves the largest materials in poetry, grandeur, and passion: consequently, that her Constance, Katherine of Arragon, Volumnia, Hermione, and Lady Macbeth stood pre-eminent. In playing Jane de Montfort, in Joanna Baillie's tragedy, her audience almost lost the sense of impersonation in the feeling of identity. She _was_ Jane de Montfort--the actress, the woman, the character, blended into each other. It is a mistaken idea that she herself preferred the part of Aspasia (in Rowe's Bajazet) to any of these grand impersonations. She spoke of it as one in which she had produced the most extraordinary effect on the _nerves_ of her audience; and this is true. "I recollect," said a gentleman to me, "being present at one of the last representations of Bajazet: and at the moment when the order is given to strangle Moneses, while Aspasia stands immoveable in front of the stage, I turned my head, unable to endure more, and to my amazement I beheld the whole pit staring ghastly, with upward faces, dilated eyes, and mouths wide open--gasping--fascinated. Nor shall I ever forget the strange effect produced by that sea of human faces, all fixed in one simultaneous expression of stony horror. It realized for a moment the fabled power of the Medusa--it was terrible!"

Of all her great characters, Lord Byron, I believe, preferred Constance, to which she gave the preference herself, and esteemed it the most difficult and the most finished of all her impersonations; but the general opinion stamps her Lady Macbeth as the grandest effort of her art; and therefore, as she was the first in her art, as the _ne plus ultra_ of acting. This at least was the opinion of one who admired her with all the fervour of a kindred genius, and could lavish on her praise of such "rich words composed as made the gift more sweet." Of her Lady Macbeth, he says, "nothing could have been imagined grander,--it was something above nature; it seemed almost as if a being of a superior order had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. In coming on in the sleeping scene, her eyes were open, but their sense was shut; she was like a person bewildered: her lips moved involuntarily; all her gestures seemed mechanical--she glided on and off the stage like an apparition. To have seen her in that character was an event in every one's life never to be forgotten."

By profound and incessant study she had brought her conception and representation of this character to such a pitch of perfection that the imagination could conceive of nothing more magnificent or more finished; and yet she has been heard to say, after playing it for thirty years, that she never read over the part without discovering in it something new; nor ever went on the stage to perform it, without spending the whole morning in studying and meditating it, line by line, as intently as if she were about to act it for the first time. In this character she bid farewell to her profession and the public, (June 29th, 1812.) The audience, on this occasion, paid her a singular and touching tribute of respect. On her going off in the sleeping scene, they commanded the curtain to fall, and would not suffer the play to proceed.[8]

The idea that Mrs. Siddons was quite unmoved by the emotions she portrayed--the sorrows and the passions she embodied with such inimitable skill and truth, is altogether false. Fine acting may accidentally be mere impulse; it never can be wholly mechanical. To a late period of her life she continued to be strongly, sometimes painfully, excited by her own acting; the part of Constance always affected her powerfully--she invariably left the stage, her face streaming with tears; and after playing Lady Macbeth, she could not sleep: even after reading the play of Macbeth a feverish, wakeful night was generally the consequence.

I am not old enough to remember Mrs. Siddons in her best days; but, judging from my own recollections, I should say that, to hear her _read_ one of Shakspeare's plays, was a higher, a more complete gratification, and a more astonishing display of her powers than her performance of any single character. On the stage she was the perfect actress; when she was reading Shakspeare, her profound enthusiastic admiration of the poet, and deep insight into his most hidden beauties, made her almost a poetess, or at least, like a priestess, full of the god of her idolatry. Her whole soul looked out from her regal brow and effulgent eyes; and then her countenance!--the inconceivable flexibility and musical intonations of her voice! there was no got-up illusion here: no scenes--no trickery of the stage; there needed no sceptred pall--no sweeping train, nor any of the gorgeous accompaniments of tragedy:--SHE was Tragedy! When in reading Macbeth she said, "give me the daggers!" they gleamed before our eyes. The witch scenes in the same play she rendered awfully terrific by the magic of looks and tones; she invested the weird sisters with all their own infernal fascinations; they were the serious, poetical, tragical personages which the poet intended them to be, and the wild grotesque horror of their enchantments made the blood curdle. When, in King John, she came to the passage beginning--

"If the midnight bell, Did with his iron tongue and brazen note," &c.

I remember I felt every drop of blood pause, and then run backwards through my veins with an overpowering awe and horror. No scenic representation I ever witnessed produced the hundredth part of the effect of her reading Hamlet. This tragedy was the triumph of her art. Hamlet and his mother, Polonius, Ophelia, were all there before us. Those who ever heard her give Ophelia's reply to Hamlet,

_Hamlet._ I loved you not.

_Ophelia._ I was the more deceived!

and the lines--

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That suck'd the honey of his music vows, &c.

will never forget their exquisite pathos. What a revelation of love and woe was there!--the very heart seemed to break upon the utterance.

Lear was another of her grandest efforts; but her rare talent was not confined to tragedy; none could exceed her in the power to conceive and render witty and humorous character. I thought I had never understood or felt the comic force of such parts as Polonius, Lucio, Gratiano, and Shakspeare's clowns, till I heard the dialogue from her lips: and to hear her read the Merchant of Venice and As You Like It, was hardly a less perfect treat than to hear her read Macbeth.

The following short extract from a letter of Mrs. Joanna Baillie, dated about a year before the death of Mrs. Siddons will, I am persuaded, be read with a double interest, for _her_ sake who penned it, not less than hers who is the subject of it.

"The most agreeable thing I have to begin with, is a visit we paid last week to Mrs. Siddons. We had met her at dinner at Mr. Rogers's a few days before, and she kindly asked us, our host and his sister, the Thursday following; an invitation which we gladly accepted, though we expected to see much decay in her powers of expression, and consequently to have our pleasure mingled with pain. Judge then of our delight when we heard her read the best scenes of Hamlet, with expression of countenance, voice, and action, that would have done honour to her best days! She was before us as an unconquerable creature, over whose astonishing gifts of nature time had no power.[9] She complained of her voice, which she said was not obedient to her will; but it appeared to my ear to be peculiarly true to nature, and the more so, because it had lost that deep solemnity of tone which she, perhaps, had considered as an excellence. I thought I could trace in the pity and tenderness, mixed with her awe of the ghost, the natural feelings of one who had lost dear friends, and expected to go to them soon; and her reading of that scene, (the noblest which dramatic art ever achieved,) went to my heart as it had never done before. At the end, Mr. Rogers very justly said, 'Oh, that we could have assembled a company of young people to witness this, that they might have conveyed the memory of it down to another generation!' In short, we left her full of admiration, as well as of gratitude, that she had made such an exertion to gratify so small an audience; for, exclusive of her own family, we were but five."

She continued to exercise her power of reading and reciting long after the date of this letter, even till within a few days of her death, although her health had long been in a declining state.[10] She died at length on the 8th of June, 1831, after a few hours of acute suffering, having lived nearly seventy-six years, of which forty-six were spent in the constant presence and service of the public. She was an honour to her profession, which was more honoured and honourable in her person and family than it ever was before, or will be hereafter, till the stage becomes something very different from what it now is.

And, since it has pleased some writers, (who apparently knew as little of her real situation as of her real character,) to lament over the misfortune of this celebrated woman, in having survived all her children, &c. &c. it may be interesting to add that, a short time before her death, she was seated in a room in her own house, when about thirty of her young relatives, children, grand-children, nephews and nieces, were assembled, and looked on while they were dancing, with great and evident pleasure: and that her surviving daughter, Cecilia Siddons,[11] who had been, for many years, the inseparable friend and companion of her mother, attended upon her with truly filial devotion and reverence to the last moment of existence. Her admirers may, therefore, console themselves with the idea that in "love, obedience, troops of friends," as well as affluence and fame, she had "all that should accompany old age." She died full of years and honours; having enjoyed, in her long life, as much glory and prosperity as any mortal could expect: having imparted more intense and general pleasure than ever mortal did; and having paid the tribute of mortality in such suffering and sorrow as wait on the widowed wife and the bereaved mother. If with such rare natural gifts were blended some human infirmities;--if the cultivation of the imaginative far above the perceptive faculties, hazarded her individual happiness;--if in the course of a professional career of unexampled continuance and splendour, the love of praise ever degenerated into the appetite for applause;--if the worshipped actress languished out of her atmosphere of incense,--is this to be made matter of wonder or of ill-natured comment? Did ever any human being escape more _intacte_ in person and mind from the fiery furnace of popular admiration? Let us remember the severity of the ordeal to which she was exposed; the hard lot of those who pass their lives in the full-noon glare of public observation, where every speck is noted! What a difference too, between the aspiration after immortality and the pursuit of celebrity!--The noise of distant and future fame is like the sound of the far-off sea, and the mingled roll of its multitudinous waves, which, as it swells on the ear, elevates the soul with a sublime emotion; but present and loud applause, flung continually in one's face, is like the noisy dash of the surf upon the rock,--and it requires the firmness of the rock to bear it.

SKETCHES OF FANNY KEMBLE IN JULIET.

INTRODUCTION AND NOTES TO MR. JOHN HAYTER'S SKETCHES OF FANNY KEMBLE, IN THE CHARACTER OF JULIET.[12]

"Non piace a lei che innumerabil turba Viva in atto di fuor, morta di dentro, Le applauda a caso, e mano a man percuota; Ne si rallegra se le rozzi voci Volgano a lei quelle induiti lodi-- --Ma la possanza del divino iugegno Vita di dentro."

_Gasparo Gozzi--Sermone xiv._

It would be doing an injustice to the author of these sketches, and something worse than injustice to her who is the subject of them, should more be expected than the pencil could possibly convey, and more required than the artist ever intended to execute. Their merit consists in their fidelity, as far as they go; their interest in conveying a lively and distinct idea of some immediate and transient effects of grace and expression. They do not assume to be portraits of Miss Kemble; they are merely a series of rapid outlines, caught from her action, and exhibiting, at the first glance, just so much of the individual and peculiar character she has thrown into her impersonation of Juliet, as at once to be recognised by those who have seen her. To them alone these isolated passages--linked together in the imagination by all the intervening graces of attitude and sentiment, by the recollection of a countenance where the kindled soul looks out through every feature, and of a voice whose tones tremble into one's very heart--will give some faint reflection of the effect produced by the whole of this beautiful piece of acting,--or rather of nature, for here "each seems either." It will be allowed, even by the most enthusiastic lover of painting, that the merely imitative arts can do but feeble justice to the powers of a fine actress; for what graphic skill can fix the evanescent shades of feeling as they melt one into another?--

"What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?"

--and yet even those who have not witnessed and may never witness Miss Kemble's performance, to whom her name alone can be borne through long intervals of space and time, will not regard these little sketches without curiosity and interest. If any one had thought of transferring to paper a connected series of some of the awe-commanding gestures of Mrs. Siddons in one of her great parts; or caught (flying) some of the inimitable graces of movement and attitude, and sparkling effects of manner, with which Mrs. Charles Kemble once enchanted the world, with what avidity would they now be sought!--they would have served as studies for their successors in art to the end of time.

All the fine arts, poetry excepted, possess a limited range of power. Painting and sculpture can convey none of the graces that belong to movement and sound: music can suggest vague sentiments and feelings, but it cannot express incident, or situation, or form, or colour. Poetry alone grasps an unlimited sceptre, rules over the whole visible and intellectual universe, and knows no bounds but those of human genius. And it is here that tragic acting, considered in its perfection, and in its relation to the fine arts, is allied to poetry, or rather is itself living, breathing poetry; made sensible in a degree to the hardest and dullest minds, seizing on the dormant sympathies of our nature, and dismissing us again to the cares of this "working-day world," if not very much wiser, or better, or happier, at least enabled to digest with less bitterness the mixture of our good and evil days.

But in the midst of the just enthusiasm which a great actor or actress excites, so long as they exist to minister to our delight;--in the midst of that atmosphere of light and life they shed around them, it is a common subject of repining that such glory should be so transient; that an art requiring in its perfection such a rare combination of mental and external qualities, can leave behind no permanent monument of its own excellence, but must depend on the other fine arts for all it can claim of immortality: that Garrick, for instance, has become a name--no more--his fame the echo of an echo! that Mrs. Siddons herself has bequeathed to posterity only a pictured semblance;--that when the voice of Pasta is heard no longer upon earth, the utmost pomp of words can only attest her powers! The painter and the poet, struggling through obscurity to the heights of fame, and consuming a life in the pursuit of (perhaps) posthumous celebrity, may say to the sublime actress,--"Thou in thy generation hast had thy meed; we have waited patiently for ours: thou art vanished like a lost star from the firmament, into the 'uncomfortable night of nothing'; we have left the light of our souls behind us, and survive to 'blessings and eternal praise!'" And why should it _not_ be so? Were it otherwise, the even-handed distribution of the best gifts of Heaven among favoured mortals might with reason be impugned. Shall the young spirit "dampt by the necessity of oblivion" disdain what is attainable because it cannot grasp all? Conceive for a moment the situation of a woman, in the prime and bloom of existence, with all her youthful enthusiasm, her unworn feelings fresh about her, privileged to step forth for a short space out of the bounds of common life, without o'erstepping the modesty of her feminine nature, permitted to cast off for a while, unreproved and unrestrained, the conventional trammels of form and manner; and called upon to realise in her own presence and person the divinest dreams of poetry and romance; to send forth in a word--a glance,--the electric flash which is felt through a thousand bosoms at once, till every heart beats the same measure with her own! Is there nothing in all this to countervail the dangers, the evils, and the vicissitudes attendant on this splendid and public exercise of talent? It may possibly become, in time, a thing of habitude; it _may_ be degraded into a mere _besoin de l'amour propre_--a necessary, yet palling excitement: but in its outset it is surely a triumph far beyond the mere intoxication of personal vanity; and to the very last, it must be deemed a magnificent and an enviable power.

It was difficult to select for graphic delineation any particular points from Miss Kemble's representation of Juliet. These drawings may not, perhaps, justify the enthusiasm she excited: but it ought to add to their value rather than detract from it, that the causes of their imperfection comprehend the very foundation on which the present and future celebrity of this young actress may be said to rest. In the first place, the power by which she seized at once on public admiration and sympathy, was not derived from any thing external. It was not founded in the splendour of her hereditary pretensions, though in them there was much to fascinate: nor in the departed or fading glories of her race: nor in the remembrance of her mother--once the young Euphrosyne of our stage: nor in the name and high talent of her father, with whom, it was _once_ feared the poetical and classical school of acting was destined to perish from the scene: nor in any mere personal advantages, for in these she has been excelled,--

"Though on her eyelids many graces sit Under the shadow of those even brows:"

nor in her extreme youth, and delicacy of figure, which tell so beautifully in the character of Juliet: nor in the acclaim of public favour--

"To have all eyes Dazzled with admiration, and all tongues Shouting loud praises; to rob every heart Of love-- This glory round about her hath thrown beams."