MR. BANDMANN IN N.4RCISSE. T HE English Stage has got a
real accession in Mr. Bandmann. It is true that the first impression he makes upon the spectator is that of a Mr. Fechter on a diminished and somewhat confined scale,—Mr. Fechter without his great freedom and verve of acting, —Mr. Fechter with the joints of his mind somewhat stiffened and passing from one stage of feeling to another in somewhat abrupt and forced transitions. But that is scarcely the final impres- sion. Mr. Bandmann's tones of sarcasm and scorn are curiously like Mr. Fechter's, so like that, when Mr. Bandmann in the first scene of the play is criticizing with the eccentric excite- ment proper to the fitful character of a half-mad actor the folly of the Parisian world of the Louis Quinze period, it is hard, with the eyes shut, to believe that one is not listening to some of the satrical criticisms on the courtier Polonius, or on Rosenkranz and Gaildenstern, or the players, in Hamlet, as these are always given by Mr. Fechter. Where Narcisse ridicules the eternal see- saw of the Encyclopaslist metaphysicians as to the action of matter on mind and mind on matter, he certainly assumes too much of the grand and princely air of Mr. Fechter's philosophizing in Hamlet, and fails to distinguish the caustic mockery of a broken heart, bringing with it complete indifference to the opinions of others, from that tone of contempt which is due almost as mach to the imperiousness of a princely nature and position, as to the pressure of moral suspicion on the soul, and of an enterprise too great for the nerve of the man who has undertaken it. Mr. Bandmann is, we think, throughout, too stately and aristocratic in his conception of Narcisse, and gives the broken-witted actor a grandeur of demeanour which is different in kind from the sort of power pro- perly due to hopeless misery and despair. Narcisse is heart- broken because the wife of his youth left him fifteen years before the time of the play, and has never been discovered by him since. His sorrow has broken the springs of his impressionable artistic nature, rendered him moody, fitful, liable to almost delirious reveries, in which he sees the past again and forgets the present, and has intensified the bitterness with which he regards the vicious and frivolous aristocracy of France for one of whom he feels sure that his wife deserted him. The frenzy and bitter- ness of such a character as this should, we think, be more different in kind from the frenzy and bitterness of a moody prince haunted by terrible suspicions and weighed down by a task too great for his resolve, than Mr. Bandmann makes it. He renders inadequately the relaxed fibre of an incoherent artist's nature, and transforms too much the fitful strength of sheer misery and ex- citement of mind, into the dictatorial strength of something like caste-pride. He is too strenuous, too stately, too commanding for his part, and fails to give us the full sense of pity which we ought to feel. And when he loses himself in the visions of his former happiness, there is too much of the direct fire of delirium, too little of the weakness of a vagrant dreamer, whose thoughts outrun his power to control them, and who has for years been sunk in melancholy dejection, about his manner. Dreami- ness is either not Mr. Bandmann's conception of the charac- ter of Narcisse, or not in his power to delineate. He speaks of himself as a broken man, unable to string himself up to a great effort ; yet his manner throughout, and even when he so speaks of himself, is flashing, determined, brilliant,—not in any way lost or moonstruck. This, and the too rapid and fiery transitions of his manner, strike us as the most prominent defects of a really remarkable piece of acting. In tenderness, too, in all the earlier scenes, he was deficient. His eye was fixed and haughty even while he recalled the image of his wife in earlier days, and his voice was not broken, but artificially silvered over with a feminine sweetness more like the tone of a mother recalling the vision of a lost darling, than the voice of a dreaming and the Court of Versailles. Mias Herbert makes in the quieter artist plunged in the memories of his first happy love. The scenes a very effective Pompadour, and especially acts with difference is that the former ahnost unconsciously attunes her perfect good taste in the scene of the last great toilette before her mind to the expression of the innocent face in her memory, while fall. In the closing scene, which ought to be one of great passion, it is quite unnatural for the latter to reflect in his voice the object she is frigid and almost stony, but does her part beautifully as a of his vision, instead of rtcalling rather the tenderness of the corpse. Miss Furtado is sufficiently keen and espiegle as the -relation which it brought with it. Mr. Bandmann, instead of Marquise d'Epinay, though a manner of somewhat higher breed.. deepening his voice with the depth of the old feeling, gives it a ing would suit the part better. When she taunts the Comte de sort of moonlight modulation, as if reflecting the beauty and Bath (we think it is) with being " incorrigible," and he retorts, -sweetness of his lost wife, and unconsciously translating her image " And you, Madame, are indispensable," the doubt is suggested to himself into sound,—a conception, as it seems to us, much whether such a Court spy as Miss Furtado represents could have more like voluntary recollection and a self-conscious rebuilding been sufficiently successful at Court to have earned such an epithet as .of the past, than the fitful and moody alienation of mind from that. The characters of the two plotters, the Due de Choiseul which Narcisse is supposed to suffer. If he were really living in and the Comte de Barn, are very well acted by Mr. Jordan and the past again, the tone should be the man's old natural tone, the Mr. Farren, and thus the whole effect of the play is quite in keep- tone of his former emotion. If he is, on the contrary, only volun- ing with the very skilful and sometimes masterly and striking tarily summoning back a vision which he finds it hard to fix before performance of the principal actor.
his mind, then, no doubt, he may really modulate his voice into a sort of fanciful sympathy with the sweetness he wishes to keep before his mind, but is in momentary fear of letting slip. In those ORISSA AFTER THE FAMINE. 'dreams when Narcisse is supposed to be lost to his actual situation [FROM AN OCCASIONAL CORRESPONDENT.]
and living again in a long-passed happiness, Mr. Bandmann gives us 1 PROMISED to give you a brief account of Orissa after the the impression rather of a memory strained to its greatest tension famine, and proceed now to realize the promise, having passed to retain its hold on the past, than of a memory which has actually through the whole of it, and in two districts, Pooree and Cuttack, -obliterated by the force of a spontaneous resurrection the aggre- having visited some of those parts of the interior in which the
sive impressions of the existing world, want of food pressed most heavily.
Mr. Bandmann's acting was much more striking when he woke Along the high roads every trace of the great calamity has .up from this strained reverie to the actual misery of his life, and nearly disappeared. The lands are all cultivated, the people and began amusing the forced leisure of his captivity by a converse- the cattle are in good case, and, but for the absence of old people, tion with the little Chinese idol which he constituted his oracle it would be difficult to realize the fact that, a few months ago, for the moment, and obliged to wag its little rocking head in gaunt famine and grim pestilence had prostrated a whole people. answer to the questions to which he desired an affirmative. In a very few places, fields are still whitened with the skulls of When he asks, "See, now, Professor, is there anywhere a region those who laid down to die in the vain struggle to reach places of tranquillity where those will be united who are separated here ?" where they hoped to find food. Among them the bones of very and sets the oracular Chinese head wagging an assent to his ques- young children and of aged people are painfully preponderant. Con, there is a tone of self-scorn in his accent, as he comforts Even these will soon vanish, and all that remained of hecatombs himself with the omen he has thus made to his own order, which ex- of victims of sheer want will have returned to the earth from presses with wonderful force that wretched mood in which men which they sprang, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
catch at straws of their own providing, and find a pleasure in it. From careful inquiry from all sorts and conditions of men— And when this scorn deepens so that at last he makes his oracle wag Native and European—and particularly from some of the excellent its head to a leading question intended to make it confess that hardworking officials who conducted the relief operations, the all its answers have been untrustworthy, and dashes it on the following appear to me to be the net results of a calamity which lioor in rage and contempt with himself, the impatience of a has again brought the great mind of England to bear upon misery augmented by enforced idleness can rarely ever have been India and her Government. In my time, the three events more finely rendered. Only this is not the sort of misery which which have for a time caused India to be studied by our is subject to illusion and a clouded mind. And it is no wonder statesmen, and dispelled for a brief space the cloud of ignorance if Mr. Bandmann has taken his cue from this scene for his reu- shrouding all relating to her among the mass of even educated the oppression of its people, the manner in which Narcisse's wrath But to return to my immediate subject. In the Balasore dis- -grows and swells when he once realizes that his wife has deserted trict one-eighth of the cultivable land is untilled. Where the love and him for such ambition as this, furnishes as fine a tragic scene want was greatest and the destruction of life largest, a very as anything we have seen on the stage for years ;—indeed, in the much larger proportion is at present out of cultivation ; but this is delineation of this concentrated passion and fire of wrath Mr. gradually shaded off until in the north of Orissa, towards Midas- Bandraann seems to us to surpass Mr. Fechter, and in this alone, pore, there are new crops on nearly every field where crops were There is less freedom, less ease, but more of tragic wrath, more of grown before the famine. This result has been arrived at by very orisp democratic hatred and fierce vengeance in his manner, than careful inquiry on the part of the local officers, tested in every we ever saw Mr. Fechter reach, possible way to secure accuracy in connection with the measures The plot of Narcisse is a curiously improbable one constructed out of Government to remit so much of the revenue as the country -of the events of the reign of Louis XV., and giving a mythical cannot fairly bear. In the central division, Cuttack, the propor- .account of the fall of Madame de Pompadour. But if we regard tion is said to be somewhat larger, and to be largest of all in the history as subservient to the fiction, instead of the fiction Pooree, of which some parts near the sea coast, fortunately limited to the history, since the plot is not absolutely impossible, in extent, have been nearly depopulated. Food is now, however, the historical framework decidedly improves it ; for it brings so cheap and abundant, and the remnant of the population so a certain richness of association to the dramatic situations, the fully equal to hard labour in consequence, that the belief is value of which has not been thrown away in the preparation general in the entire recovery of the province as regards its of the play for the stage. We have seldom seen a play better put agricultural products in throe years. The whole of the land on the stage as regards the complete training of the whole cast which was uncultivated at the close of the famine was not reduced of actors, and the care taken to make each and all sub- to this state by that event. A good deal was allowed to fall out servient to the general effect. Miss Milly Palmer acts very of cultivation near the close of the last settlement, lest the assess- nicely,—though not entirely without staginess,—the part of the ment should be increased. The old settlement, which is declared French actress Doris Quinault, who is the link between Narcisse by those best acquainted with the subject to have been singularly
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