Читать книгу Miss Bretherton - Mrs. Humphry Ward - Страница 6

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On their arrival at the theatre armed with Miss Bretherton's order, Mrs. Stuart's party found themselves shown into a large roomy box close to the stage—too close, indeed, for purposes of seeing well. The house was already crowded, and Kendal noticed, as he scanned the stalls and boxes through his opera-glass, that it contained a considerable sprinkling of notabilities of various kinds. It was a large new theatre, which hitherto had enjoyed but a very moderate share of popular favour, so that the brilliant and eager crowd with which it was now filled was in itself a sufficient testimony to the success of the actress who had wrought so great a transformation.

'What an experience this is for a girl of twenty-one,' whispered Kendal to Mrs. Stuart, who was comfortably settled in the farther corner of the box, her small dainty figure set off by the crimson curtains behind it. 'One would think that an actor's life must stir the very depths of a man or woman's individuality, that it must call every power into action, and strike sparks out of the dullest.'

'Yes; but how seldom it is so!'

'Well, in England, at any rate, the fact is, their training is so imperfect they daren't let themselves go. It's only when a man possesses the lower secrets of his art perfectly that he can aim at the higher. But the band is nearly through the overture. Just tell me before the curtain goes up something about the play. I have only very vague ideas about it. The scene is laid at Berlin?'

'Yes; in the Altes Schloss at Berlin. The story is based upon the legend of the White Lady.'

'What? the warning phantom of the Hohenzollerns?'

Mrs. Stuart nodded. 'A Crown-Prince of Prussia is in love with the beautiful Countess Hilda von Weissenstein. Reasons of State, however, oblige him to throw her over and to take steps towards marriage with a Princess of Würtemberg. They have just been betrothed when the Countess, mad with jealousy, plays the part of the White Lady and appears to the Princess, to try and terrify her out of the proposed marriage.'

'And the Countess is Miss Bretherton?'

'Yes. Of course the malicious people say that her get-up as the White Lady is really the raison d'etre of the piece. But hush! there is the signal. Make up your mind to be bored by the Princess; she is one of the worst sticks I ever saw!'

The first scene represented the ballroom at the Schloss, or rather the royal anteroom, beyond which the vista of the ballroom opened. The Prussian and Würtemberg royalties had not yet arrived, with the exception of the Prince Wilhelm, on whose matrimonial prospects the play was to turn. He was engaged in explaining the situation to his friend, Waldemar von Rothenfels, the difficulties in which he was placed, his passion for the Countess Hilda, the political necessities which forced him to marry a daughter of the House of Würtemberg, the pressure brought to bear upon him by his parents, and his own despair at having to break the news to the Countess.

The story is broken off by the arrival of the royalties, including the pink-and-white maiden who is to be Prince Wilhelm's fate, and the royal quadrille begins. The Prince leads his Princess to her place, when it is discovered that another lady is required to complete the figure, and an aide-de-camp is despatched into the ballroom to fetch one. He returns, ushering in the beautiful Hilda von Weissenstein.

For this moment the audience had been impatiently waiting, and when the dazzling figure in its trailing, pearl-embroidered robes appeared in the doorway of the ballroom, a storm of applause broke forth again and again, and for some minutes delayed the progress of the scene.

Nothing, indeed, could have been better calculated than this opening to display the peculiar gifts of the actress. The quadrille was a stately spectacular display, in which splendid dress and stirring music and the effects of rhythmic motion had been brought freely into play for the delight of the beholders. Between the figures there was a little skilfully-managed action, mostly in dumb show. The movements of the jealous beauty and of her faithless lover were invested throughout with sufficient dramatic meaning to keep up the thread of the play. But it was not the dramatic aspect of the scene for which the audience cared, it was simply for the display which it made possible of Isabel Bretherton's youth and grace and loveliness. They hung upon her every movement, and Kendal found himself following her with the same eagerness of eye as those about him, lest any phase of that embodied poetry should escape him.

In this introductory scene, the elements which went to make up the spell she exercised over her audience were perfectly distinguishable. Kendal's explanation of it to himself was that it was based upon an exceptional natural endowment of physical perfection, informed and spiritualised by certain moral qualities, by simplicity, frankness, truth of nature. There was a kind of effluence of youth, of purity, of strength, about her which it was impossible not to feel, and which evidently roused the enthusiastic sympathy of the great majority of those who saw her.

Forbes was sitting in the front of the box with Mrs. Stuart, his shaggy gray head and keen lined face attracting considerable attention in their neighbourhood. He was in his most expansive mood; the combativeness of an hour before had disappeared, and the ardent susceptible temperament of the man was absorbed in admiration, in the mere sensuous artist's delight in a stirring and beautiful series of impressions. When the white dress disappeared through the doorway of the ballroom, he followed it with a sigh of regret, and during the scene which followed between the Prince and his intended bride, he hardly looked at the stage. The Princess, indeed, was all that Mrs. Stuart had pronounced her to be; she was stiffer and clumsier than even her Teutonic rôle could justify, and she marched laboriously through her very proper and virtuous speeches, evidently driven on by an uneasy consciousness that the audience was only eager to come to the end of them and of her.

In the little pause which followed the disappearance of the newly-betrothed pair into the distant ballroom, Mrs. Stuart leant backward over her chair and said to Kendal:

'Now then, Mr. Kendal, prepare your criticisms! In the scene which is just coming Miss Bretherton has a good deal more to do than to look pretty!'

'Oh, but you forget our compact!' said Kendal. 'Remember you are to be the judge of our behaviour at the end. It is not the part of a judge to tempt those on whom he is to deliver judgment to crime.'

'Don't put too much violence on yourselves!' said Mrs. Stuart, laughing. 'You and Edward can have the back of the box to talk what heresy you like in, so long as you let Mr. Forbes perform his devotions undisturbed.'

At this Forbes half turned round, and shook his great mane, under which gleamed a countenance of comedy menace, at the two men behind him. But in another instant the tones of Isabel Bretherton's voice riveted his attention, and the eyes of all those in the box were once more turned towards the stage.

The scene which followed was one of the most meritorious passages in the rather heavy German play from which the White Lady had been adapted. It was intended to show the romantic and passionate character of the Countess, and to suggest that vein of extravagance and daring in her which was the explanation of the subsequent acts. In the original the dialogue had a certain German force and intensity, which lost nothing of its occasional heaviness in the mouth of Hawes, the large-boned swaggering personage who played the Prince. An actress with sufficient force of feeling, and an artistic sense subtle enough to suggest to her the necessary modulations, could have made a great mark in it. But the first words, almost, revealed Isabel Bretherton's limitations, and before two minutes were over Kendal was conscious of a complete collapse of that sympathetic relation between him and the actress which the first scene had produced. In another sentence or two the spell had been irrevocably broken, and he seemed to himself to have passed from a state of sensitiveness to all that was exquisite and rare in her to a state of mere irritable consciousness of her defects. It was evident to him that in a scene of great capabilities she never once rose beyond the tricks of an elementary elocution, that her violence had a touch of commonness in it which was almost vulgarity, and that even her attitudes had lost half their charm. For, in the effort—the conscious and laboured effort of acting—her movements, which had exercised such an enchantment over him in the first scene, had become mere strides and rushes, never indeed without grace, but often without dignity, and at all times lacking in that consistency, that unity of plan which is the soul of art.

The sense of chill and disillusion was extremely disagreeable to him, and, by the time the scene was half-way through, he had almost ceased to watch her. Edward Wallace, who had seen her some two or three times in the part, was perfectly conscious of the change, and had been looking out for it.

'Not much to be said for her, I am afraid, when she comes to business,' he said to Kendal in a whisper, as the two leant against the door of the box. 'Where did she get those tiresome tricks she has, that see-saw intonation she puts on when she wants to be pathetic, and that absurd restlessness which spoils everything? It's a terrible pity. Sometimes I think I catch a gleam of some original power at the bottom, but there is such a lack of intelligence—in the artist's sense. It is a striking instance of how much and how little can be done without education.'

'It is curiously bad, certainly,' said Kendal, while the actress's denunciations of her lover were still ringing through the theatre. 'But look at the house! What folly it is ever to expect a great dramatic art in England. We have no sense for the rudiments of the thing. The French would no more tolerate such acting as this because of the beauty of the actress than they would judge a picture by its frame. However, if men like Forbes leave their judgment behind them, it's no wonder if commoner mortals follow suit.'

'There!' said Wallace, with a sigh of relief as the curtain fell on the first act, 'that's done with. There are two or three things in the second act that are beautiful. In her first appearance as the White Lady she is as wonderful as ever, but the third act is a nuisance—'

'No whispering there,' said Forbes, looking round upon them. 'Oh, I know what you're after, Edward, perfectly. I hear it all with one ear.'

'That,' said Wallace, moving up to him, 'is physically impossible. Don't be so pugnacious. We leave you the front of the box, and when we appear in your territory our mouths are closed. But in our own domain we claim the rights of free men.'

'Poor girl!' said Forbes, with a sigh. 'How she manages to tame London as she does is a marvel to me! If she were a shade less perfect and wonderful than she is, she would have been torn to pieces by you critics long ago. You have done your best as it is, only the public won't listen to you. Oh, don't suppose I don't see all that you see. The critical poison's in my veins just as it is in yours, but I hold it in check—it shan't master me. I will have my pleasure in spite of it, and when I come across anything in life that makes me feel, I will protect my feeling from it with all my might.'

'We are dumb,' said Kendal, with a smile; 'otherwise I would pedantically ask you to consider what are the feelings to which the dramatic art properly and legitimately appeals.'

'Oh, hang your dramatic art,' said Forbes, firing up; 'can't you take things simply and straightforwardly? She is there—she is doing her best for you—there isn't a movement or a look which isn't as glorious as that of a Diana come to earth, and you won't let it charm you and conquer you, because she isn't into the bargain as confoundedly clever as you are yourselves! Well, it's your loss, not hers.'

'My dear Mr. Forbes,' said Mrs. Stuart, with her little judicial peace-making air, 'we shall all go away contented. You will have had your sensation, they will have had their sense of superiority, and, as for me, I shall get the best of it all round. For, while you are here, I see Miss Bretherton with your eyes, and yet, as Edward will get hold of me on the way home, I shan't go to bed without having experienced all the joys of criticism! Oh! but now hush, and listen to this music. It is one of the best things in the evening, and we shall have the White Lady directly.'

As she spoke, the orchestra, which was a good one, and perhaps the most satisfactory feature in the performance, broke into some weird Mendelssohnian music, and when the note of plaintiveness and mystery had been well established, the curtain rose upon the great armoury of the castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and masses of faintly gleaming steel. The scene which followed, in which the Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the Hohenzollerns, whose appearance bodes misfortune and death to those who behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of driving her and those interested in her by sheer force of terror from the castle and from Berlin, had been poetically conceived, and it furnished Miss Bretherton with an admirable opportunity. As the White Lady, gliding between rows of armed and spectral figures on either hand, and startling the Princess and her companion by her sudden apparition in a gleam of moonlight across the floor, she was once more the representative of all that is most poetical and romantic in physical beauty. Nay, more than this; as she flung her white arms above her head, or pointed to the shrinking and fainting figure of her rival while she uttered her wailing traditional prophecy of woe, her whole personality seemed to be invested with a dramatic force of which there had been no trace in the long and violent scene with the Prince. It was as though she was in some sort capable of expressing herself in action and movement, while in all the arts of speech she was a mere crude novice. At any rate, there could be no doubt that in this one scene she realised the utmost limits of the author's ideal, and when she faded into the darkness beyond the moonlight in which she had first appeared, the house, which had been breathlessly silent during the progress of the apparition, burst into a roar of applause, in which Wallace and Kendal heartily joined.

'Exquisite!' said Kendal in Mrs. Stuart's ear, as he stood behind her chair. 'She was romance itself! Her acting should always be a kind of glorified and poetical pantomime; she would be inimitable so.'

Mrs. Stuart looked up and smiled agreement. 'Yes, that scene lives with one. If everything else in the play is poor, she is worth seeing for that alone. Remember it!'

The little warning was in season, for the poor White Lady had but too many after opportunities of blurring the impression she had made. In the great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition. In the two or three fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term 'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of long and complex processes of education. There, indeed, was the bald, plain fact—the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education. It was evident that her technical training had been of the roughest. In all technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air, which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had been of the poorest type. And in all other respects—when it came to interpretation or creation—she was spoilt by her entire want of that inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the present. For an actress must have one of the two kinds of knowledge: she must have either the knowledge which comes from a fine training—in itself the outcome of a long tradition—or she must have the knowledge which comes from mere living, from the accumulations of personal thought and experience. Miss Bretherton had neither. She had extraordinary beauty and charm, and certainly, as Kendal admitted, some original quickness. He was not inclined to go so far as to call it 'power.' But this quickness, which would have been promising in a debutante less richly endowed on the physical side, seemed to him to have no future in her. 'It will be checked,' he said to himself, 'by her beauty and all that flows from it. She must come to depend more and more on the physical charm, and on that only. The whole pressure of her success is and will be that way.'

Miss Bretherton's inadequacy, indeed, became more and more visible as the play was gradually and finely worked up to its climax in the last act. In the final scene of all, the Prince, who by a series of accidents has discovered the Countess Hilda's plans, lies in wait for her in the armoury, where he has reason to know she means to try the effect of a third and last apparition upon the Princess. She appears; he suddenly confronts her; and, dragging her forward, unveils before himself and the Princess the death-like features of his old love. Recovering from the shock of detection, the Countess pours out upon them both a fury of jealous passion, sinking by degrees into a pathetic, trance-like invocation of the past, under the spell of which the Prince's anger melts away, and the little Princess's terror and excitement change into eager pity. Then, when she sees him almost reconquered, and her rival weeping beside her, she takes the poison phial from her breast, drinks it, and dies in the arms of the man for whose sake she has sacrificed beauty, character, and life itself.

A great actress could hardly have wished for a better opportunity. The scene was so obviously beyond Miss Bretherton's resources that even the enthusiastic house, Kendal fancied, cooled down during the progress of it. There were signs of restlessness, there was even a little talking in some of the back rows, and at no time during the scene was there any of that breathless absorption in what was passing on the stage which the dramatic material itself amply deserved.

'I don't think this will last very long,' said Kendal in Wallace's ear. 'There is something tragic in a popularity like this; it rests on something unsound, and one feels that disaster is not far off. The whole thing impresses me most painfully. She has some capacity, of course; if only the conditions had been different—if she had been born within a hundred miles of the Paris Conservatoire, if her youth had been passed in a society of more intellectual weight—but, as it is, this very applause is ominous, for the beauty must go sooner or later, and there is nothing else.'

'You remember Desforêts in this same theatre last year in Adrienne Lecouvreur?' said Wallace. 'What a gulf between the right thing and the wrong! But come, we must do our duty;' and he drew Kendal forward towards the front of the box, and they saw the whole house on its feet, clapping and shouting, and the curtain just being drawn back to let the White Lady and the Prince appear before it. She was very pale, but the storm of applause which greeted her seemed to revive her, and she swept her smiling glance round the theatre, until at last it rested with a special gleam of recognition on the party in the box, especially on Forbes, who was outdoing himself in enthusiasm. She was called forward again and again, until at last the house was content, and the general exit began.

The instant after her white dress had disappeared from the stage, a little page-boy knocked at the door of the box with a message that 'Miss Bretherton begs that Mrs. Stuart and her friends will come and see her.' Out they all trooped, along a narrow passage, and up a short staircase, until a rough temporary door was thrown open, and they found themselves in the wings, the great stage, on which the scenery was being hastily shifted, lying to their right. The lights were being put out; only a few gas-jets were left burning round a pillar, beside which stood Isabel Bretherton, her long phantom dress lying in white folds about her, her uncle and aunt and her manager standing near. Every detail of the picture—the spot of brilliant light bounded on all sides by dim, far-reaching vistas of shadow, the figures hurrying across the back of the stage, the moving ghost-like workmen all around, and in the midst that white-hooded, languid figure—revived in Kendal's memory whenever in after days his thoughts went wandering back to the first moment of real contact between his own personality and that of Isabel Bretherton.