Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 33, December, 1873», sayfa 14

And Sheila did. And her father chose the songs for her, and they were the blithest he could find, and the girl seemed really in excellent spirits. They had their pipes and their hot whisky and water in this little parlor; Mr. Mackenzie explaining that although his daughter was accustomed to spacious and gilded drawing-rooms where such a thing was impossible, she would do anything to make her friends welcome and comfortable, and they might fill their glasses and their pipes with impunity. And Sheila sang again and again, all cheerful and sensible English songs, and she listened to the odd jokes and stories her friends had to tell her; and Mackenzie was delighted with the success of his plans and precautions. Was not her very appearance now a triumph? She was laughing, smiling, talking to every one: he had not seen her so happy for many a day.

In the midst of it all, when the night had come apace, what was this wild skirl outside that made everybody start? Mackenzie jumped to his feet, with an angry vow in his heart that if this "teffle of a piper John" should come down the hill playing "Lochaber no more" or "Cha till mi tualadh" or any other mournful tune, he would have his chanter broken in a thousand splinters over his head. But what was the wild air that came nearer and nearer, until John marched into the house, and came, with ribbons and pipes, to the very door of the room, which was flung open to him? Not a very appropriate air, perhaps, for it was

 
The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!
The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!
The Campbells are coming to bonny Lochleven!
The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!
 

But it was, to Mr. Mackenzie's rare delight, a right good joyous tune, and it was meant as a welcome to Sheila; and forthwith he caught the white-haired piper by the shoulder and dragged him in, and said, "Put down your pipes and come into the house, John—put down your pipes and tek off your bonnet, and we shall hef a good dram together this night, by Kott! And it is Sheila herself will pour out the whisky for you, John; and she is a good Highland girl, and she knows the piper was never born that could be hurt by whisky, and the whisky was never yet made that could hurt a piper. What do you say to that, John?"

John did not answer: he was standing before Sheila with his bonnet in his hand, but with his pipes still proudly over his shoulder. And he took the glass from her and called out "Shlainte!" and drained every drop of it out to welcome Mackenzie's daughter home.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

MR. E. LYTTON BULWER

In looking over, not very long since, a long—neglected, thin portfolio of my twin-brother, the late Willis Gaylord Clark of Philadelphia, I came across a sealed parcel endorsed "London Correspondence." It contained letters to him from many literary persons of more or less eminence at that time in the British metropolis; among others, two from Miss Landon ("L.E.L."); two from Mrs. S. C. Hall, the versatile and clever author of Tales and Sketches of the Irish Peasantry, cordial, closely—written and recrossed to the remotest margin; one from her husband, Mr. S.C. Hall; three or four from Mr. Chorley; and lastly, five or six elaborate letters from Mr. E. Lytton Bulwer, sent through his American publishers, the Brothers Harper, by Washington Irving, then secretary of legation to the American embassy "near the court of St. James." Enclosed with these last-mentioned letters was a communication from Miss Fanny Kemble, to whom they had been sent for perusal, and who, in returning them, did not hesitate to say that she did Not share his young American correspondent's admiration for the author of Pelham. She had met him frequently in London society, and regarded his manners as affected and himself as a reflex of his own conceited model of a gentleman—a style which Thackeray perhaps did not too grossly caricature when he made Chawls Yellowplush announce, from his own lips, his sounding name and title to a distinguished London drawing-room as "Sa-wa-Edou-wah'd-à-Lyttod-à-Bulwig!"

The poems which my brother had written for two London journals at the time of their first appearance and sudden popularity, the London Literary Gazette and, I believe, the Athenæum, led to the correspondence I have mentioned; and from the letters of Mr. Bulwer I have extracted a few passages, as somewhat personal in their nature, besides being characteristic of his tone of thought and manner of expression at that period of his career:

"An author who has a just confidence in his attainments and powers, who knows that his mind is imperishable and capable of making daily additions to its own strength, is always more desirous of seeing the censures (if not mere abuse) than the praises of those who aspire to judge him; and any suggestions or admonitions thus bestowed are seldom disregarded. But if he is to profit by criticism, the motive must be known to him. It is by no means natural to take the advice of an enemy. When the critic enters his department of literature in the false guise of urbanity and candor merely to conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object of his fear or envy."

"Seldom indeed is it that injustice fails to be seen through, or that the policy of interested condemnation escapes undetected. They first produce the excitements, then furnish the triumphs, of genius."

"There is a charm in writing for the pure and intelligent young worth all the plaudits of sinister or hypocritical wisdom. At a certain age, and while the writings that please have a gloss of novelty about them, hiding the blemishes that may afterward be discovered as their characteristics,—then it is that the young convert their approbation into enthusiasm. An author benefits in a wide and most pleasing range of public opinion by this natural and common disposition in the young; and the only cloud thrown athwart the rays of pleasure thus saluting his spirit is flung from the thought that they who are thus moved by the movings of his own mind may come in a few years to look upon his pages with hearts less ardent in their sympathies, and with altered eyes, which have acquired additional keenness by looking longer upon the world."

"The competent American littérateur has a glorious career before him. So much is there in your magnificent country, hitherto undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all may be wells from which he may be the first to drink. Yet it cannot be expected—for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature—that there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are commonly regarded with eyes of invidious jaundice by the elders, whose waning reputations they may through industry either supplant or explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success, and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit. Yet these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance its inevitable conquests."

"It is a sight of gratification and pride to behold a laborer in the vineyard of letters escaping from the envy, the jealousy, the rivalry, the leaven of all uncharitableness, with which literary intercourse is so often polluted. The writers of England have been tardy in their justice, not only to the progress, circumstances and customs of America, but to her intellectual offspring; and the time is not remote—nay, has already dawned—when, in this regard, the spirit of Change wields his wand and finds obedience to his prerogatives."

"'No hostility between nations affects the arts:' so said the old maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism. They who feel it, feel also the virtue which dictated the aphorism. Men whose object is to enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to refine the tastes of others—men who feel that this object is dearer to them than a petty and vain ambition—feel also that all who labor in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists in one climate as in another—in a I republic or in a despotism: these are the best cosmopolites, the truest citizens of the world."

The foregoing extracts will make it obvious that Mr. Bulwer was at that time sore at the treatment he had received at the hands of certain of his critics, who were by no means unanimous in their estimation of his genius. He was very sensitive at all times of adverse comment upon his writings. Thackeray wounded him woefully when he made "Chawls Yellowplush" review him characteristically in Punch. These most amusing papers ought to have been included in Thackeray's published miscellaneous writings, but they were not, although Bulwer is humorously travestied in Punch's "Prize Novelists," together with Lover, Ainsworth, and Disraeli. The subjoined will show the style of the "littery" footman, who, as a critic, "sumtimes gave kissis, sumtimes kix":

"One may objeck to an immence deal of your writings, witch, betwigst you and me, contain more sham sentiment, sham morallaty and sham potry than you'd like to own; but in spite of this, there's the stuf you; you've a kind and loyal heart in your buzm, bar'net—a trifle deboshed, praps: a keen i, igspecially for what is comick (as for your tragady, it's mighty flatchulent), and a ready pleasn't pen. The man who says you're an As, is an As himself. Dont b'lieve him, bar'net: not that I suppose you will; for, if I've formed a correck opinion of you from your wuck, you think your small beear as good as most men's. Every man does—and wy not? We brew, and we love our own tap—amen; but the pint betwigst us is this steupid, absudd way of crying out because the public don't like it too. Wy should they, my dear bar'net? You may vow that they are fools, or that the critix are your enemies, or that the world should judge your poams by your critikle rules, and not by their own. You may beat your brest, and vow that you are a martyr, but you won't mend the matter."

After these general remarks, the critic-footman takes up the subject of style, and argues with a good deal of ingenuity and force in favor of simplicity and terseness, especially in his performance of The Sea-Captain:

"Sea-captings should not be eternly spowting, and invoking gods, hevn, starz, and angels, and other silestial influences. We can all do it, bar'net: no-think in life is easier. I can compare my livery buttons to the stars, or the clouds of my backr pipe to the dark vollums that ishew from Mount Hetna; or I can say that angles are looking down from them, and the tobacco-silf, like a happy soil released, is circling round and upwards, and shaking sweetness down. All this is as easy as to drink; but it's not potry, bar'net, nor natral. Pipple, when their mothers reckonise them, don't howl about the suckumambient air, and paws to think of the happy leaves a-rustling—leastways, one mistrusts them if they do…Look at the neat grammaticle twist of Lady Arundel's spitch too, who in the cors of three lines has made her son a prince, a lion with a sword and coronal, and a star. Wy gauble, and sheak up metafers in this way, bar'net? One simile is quite enuff in the best of sentences; and I preshume I need not tell you that it's as well to have it like while you are about it. Take my advice, honrabble sir: listen to an umble footman: it's genrally best in potry to understand perffickly what you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning clearly affterward: the simpler the words the better, praps. You may, for instans, call a coronet an 'ancestral coronal,' if you like, as you might call a hat a 'swart sombrero,' a glossy four-and-nine, a 'silken helm, to storm impermeable,' and 'lightsome as a breezy gossamer;' but in the long run it's as well to call it a hat. It is a hat, and that name is quite as poeticle as another."

The remarks of Mr. Yellowplush upon some of the segregated passages are amusing enough. Take the following, for example:

 
Girl, beware!
The love that trifles round the charm it gilds,
Oft ruins while it shines.
 

Igsplane this, men and angles! I've tried every way; backards, forards, and all sorts of trancepositions:

 
The love that ruins round the charm it shines
Gilds while it trifles oft,
 

or—

 
The charm that gilds around the love it ruins,
Oft trifles while it shines,
 

or—

 
The ruins that love gilds and shines around
Oft trifles while it charms,
 

or—

 
Love while it charms shines round and ruins oft
The trifles that it gilds,
 

or—

 
The love that trifles, gilds and ruins oft
While round the charm it shines.
 

All witch are as sen sable as the ferst passadge. Sir Mr. Bullwig, ain't I right? Such, barring the style, was the tenor of many of the critiques upon Bulwer's writings which appeared about that period, and which, as is now well known, "wrought him much annoy," versatile and powerful as his genius has since proved itself.

L. GAYLORD CLARK.

SALVINI'S OTHELLO

It might have been supposed that whatever the fate of the stage among other races, it would always maintain its position as one of the great instruments of popular culture with the English-speaking nations, linked as it is inseparably with the immortal name of Shakespeare in his double capacity of author and actor, and possessing as it does in his works a body of dramatic literature supreme alike in all intellectual qualities and in fitness for scenic representation. Yet it is but the other day that we were reminded by the announcement of Macready's death of the long interval that had elapsed since the last of the English tragedians had dropped a sceptre which there was no one to take up; and now it is an actor of another race, speaking a different language, who presents himself to fill the vacant place, and to interpret for us anew creations which we study indeed more closely than ever in the printed page, but of which we had ceased to ask for any adequate palpable embodiment. Our impression, however, of a drama is and must be incomplete until we have seen it on the stage: it must be put in action before our eyes ere we can hope fully to understand it. The amount of thoughtful and learned criticism to which Shakespeare's plays have been subjected makes us forget at times that the ultimate test of their excellence is to be found on the boards, and that they were meant, above all things, to be acted.

Taking Othello as Salvini presents him to us, and merely in the light of a dramatic performance, having cast from out our minds the recollection of all that we have ever heard, read or thought about the character—more than this, forgetting our native English and knowing Shakespeare only through the libretto in our hands (of which, however, we must forbear to speak slightingly, for from it, we are told, Salvini himself has gained his knowledge of the part),—putting ourselves in this mental attitude, the performance may safely be said to defy criticism, or rather to be above it, except such criticism as accords with enthusiastic admiration. It is absolutely without a shortcoming, seen from this standpoint. His majestic bearing, his beautiful elocution, his pure voice, his graceful, expressive gestures, and above all his perfect freedom from affectation or self-consciousness, delight us throughout; and when to these qualities are added the marvelous vigor of expression and force of passion with which he shakes his audience from the middle of the play on, one feels as if there were nothing more to ask of acting. No description, in fact, can do justice to the perfect consistency and harmony of his conception, or to the marvelous delicacy of his points, which are yet as penetrating as they are subtle, and which never fail of their effect, whether rendered by a gesture whose power of expression seems to make words superfluous, as when in reply to Iago's hypocritically sympathetic "I see this has a little dashed your spirits," which is answered in the play by "Not a jot, not a jot," Salvini tries to speak, but chokes with the words, and lifting his hand with a motion of denial and deprecation, tells us what he would fain say, but cannot; or by an intonation of voice, as when in answer to Iago's "You would be satisfied?" he replies, marking the difference between conditional and imperative with a tone that would of itself betray him born to command—

 
Vorrei, che dico—io voglio
(Would?—Nay, I will).
 

And when in his desperate pain and fury, maddened by the poison working within, he drags Iago to the front of the stage, and holding him by the throat speaks Shakespeare's meaning, if not Shakespeare's words, thick and fast, as if he were not an actor, but Othello himself, and while his audience listen with bated breath and quick-beating hearts, he hurls him to the ground, and in the uncurbed fury of his mood raises his foot to spurn him like a dog,—then he rises far above ordinary dramatic effect: his art does "hold the mirror up to Nature." We feel that we have seen Othello.

Again, in the fourth act, when Iago brings home to him the realization of his wife's infidelity, what can be finer than the sharpening of his voice from stress of pain, changing from the full roundness of its usual masculine robustness to a high womanish key, as he asks the fatal questions, "Che disse? Che? Che fece?" What words could have said so much as the dumb show with which he signifies that terrible fact of which he can neither ask nor hear in words? And who can doubt when he hears that cry of agony that bursts from his lips at Iago's gross confirmation of his suggestion that it is the cry of a man stabbed to the heart? His suffering is as real to us as the agony of a lion would be if we stood by and saw some one drive a knife into the beast up to the hilt. It equals in reality any exhibition of simple unfeigned bodily pain, with all its intensity of violence. The word "rant" never once comes into our minds.

Salvini expresses everything. He demands nothing from his audience but eyes and ears; he acts the part in every detail; he does just what he aims to do. His motion is as unconscious and unfettered as that of a deer or a tiger: whether he paces with a stealthy, restless tread up and down the back of the stage, reminding us irresistibly of a caged wild beast, or whether he half crouches, then drags himself along, and then darts upon Iago in the last scene, it is always plain that his body is the servant of his mind: he moves in harmony with his mood.

Despite, therefore, the natural tendency to scrutinize closely the claims of a foreigner seeking to rule over our hearts as the vicegerent of Shakespeare's sovreignty, there has been, and happily can be, no question in regard to one essential point. That Salvini is a born actor, a great tragedian, none will be bold enough to dispute. In that rare combination of intellectual and physical qualities without which no particular gift would justify his pretensions—intensity of emotion, subtlety of perception, a power of impersonation implying of itself the union of all the natural requirements with a mastery in their display attainable only by consummate art—it is hard to believe that he can ever have been excelled; though doubtless the mingled fire and pathos of Kean transcended in their effect any like exhibition ever witnessed on the stage. Except for the few—if any still survive—who can remember the Othello of Kean, living recollection affords no opportunity for a judgment founded on comparison.

The only question therefore which it is possible to raise relates to Salvini's conception of the character—a question such as must always exist in the case of any representation of Shakespeare, with whose creations no actor can ever hope to identify himself, however he may modify our former impressions. Let it be remembered, too, that an actor's conception of a character must never be vague, undefined or shadowy, as that of a mere reader may well be, and probably will be in the exact degree in which he is a keen and appreciative student. The actor must not strive to suggest all possible solutions, but must hold firmly to one, and that the most dramatic; he must seize upon the salient points; his subtleties must not be too subtle for gesture, glance and tone to express; he must choose which meaning out of many meanings he shall enforce, which mood out of many moods he shall make predominate.

The exceptions which have been taken to Salvini's performance all rest upon the notion that he has misconceived the character. It is superb, we are told, but it is not Shakespeare. It is a representation not of Othello the Moor, but of a Moor named Othello. The idea that dominates throughout is that of race: the character loses its individuality and becomes a mere type, an embodiment of the tropical nature, an illustration of Byron's lines:

 
Africa is all the sun's,
And as her earth her human clay is kindled.
 

The unbridled passion, the revengeful fury, is that of a savage. The anguish and indignation of a noble spirit believing itself outraged and wronged are transformed into the blind rage and capricious fury of a wild beast.

This objection seems to us to spring from the state of mind often induced by long familiarity with a subject, in which the gain of minute knowledge is accompanied by a loss of the force and vividness of the first impression. People study Shakespeare as they study the Bible, softening whatever they find revolting until they have convinced themselves that it does not exist. Actors in general share in this sentiment or strive to gratify it. Othello's complexion is forgotten in the reading, and becomes in the representation such that the spectator feels no repugnance to his marriage with the fair Desdemona. Betrayed through the mere openness and generosity of his nature, he acts only as a sensitive and vehement nature would be compelled to act in so terrible a complication, and the emotions kindled by his demeanor and conduct are never those of horror and repulsion, but only of pity and admiration.

But, however noble and pathetic such a rendering may be, it consorts better with the ideas and demands of the present time than with those of the Elizabethan age. The dramatist who began by writing Titus Andronicus had at least no instinctive distaste to repulsive subjects, no fear of shocking his audience by an exhibition of untamed barbarity. Othello is "of a free and open nature," he is "great of heart," he is above doing wrong without provocation, real or supposed. But his nature admits no possibility of self-control, of reason in the midst of doubts, of patience under injury. His temperament betrays itself in physical exhibitions wild and portentous. "You are fatal then when your eyes roll so," is the suggestive cry of Desdemona. In his perplexity and fury he swoons and foams. He overhears an insult to Venice and slays the traducer. His language to the wife whom he still loves while believing himself dishonored by her is such that "a beggar, in his drink, could not have laid such terms upon his callet." He outrages her kinsman and a throng of attendants by striking her in their presence. Her protestations of innocence serve only to inflame him, and he cuts short her last pleadings with his murderous hand in a way which would have forced M. Dumas fils himself to cry out, "Ne tue la pas!"

How are this fury and this credulity, both equally insensate, to be explained, how are they to be reconciled with traits that compel sympathy and admiration, except as the workings of a nature essentially uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but while subject to those fiery tests under which all that is foreign or acquired melts away, and the primal components of the character are revealed in their bareness and in their depths. Othello's race is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. It throws a fatality on that marriage which seems unnatural even to those who yet do not suspect that the discordancy lies deeper than in the complexion. It makes him the easy victim of a plot which would otherwise only have ensnared its concoctor. It sweeps away all impediments to the catastrophe, making it swift, inevitable and dire. And it is by seizing upon this central fact that Salvini has been enabled to render his performance artistically perfect. Were the conception radically false, there could not be the same unity in the execution, the same harmony in the details. We shall not assert that his is the ideal Othello, or that such an Othello is possible. Shakespeare's creations cannot be bounded by the limit of another idiosyncrasy. But we hold that, if he does not put into the character all that belongs to it, he puts nothing into it that does not belong to it. We may miss in the accents of his despair a pathos capable of assuaging our horror; but this latter emotion, equally legitimate, is commonly stifled altogether, leaving us more disposed to linger lovingly beside the dead than to shudder and exclaim with Ludovico, "The object poisons sight;—let it be hid."

A.F.