Fanny and Sarah
WHAT would one not give to have seen young Fanny Kemble, who could move so beautifully, and had such wonderful eyes and eyebrows, rushing across the stage as Juliet to throw herself in an agony of nerves into the arm of her mother, who, luckily, was playing Lady Capulet ! What would one not give to have seen the divine Sarah (great actresses, like Stuart kings, have the right to that adjective) in her palmiest days as l'Aiglon or la dame aux carnelian ! What would one not, &c. ; . . . Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, Kitty Clive as Nell Jobson, Mrs. Cibber as Folly! The worst of it all is that nothing remains ; it is like the scent of last year's roses which we shall never smell, or like that '37 claret that we shall never drink. Most exasperating ! Wine, roses, actresses, are not what they were : we live too late, clinging like starved flies to this declining meridian of time. That is the worst of actresses (and actors) whom we have never known. Ilibm kt, particularly actresses. Why could they not leave behind them pyramids, arches, obelisks, or other irregularities of vainglory ? We wish we had never heard about them.
They have, however, biographers. That is something, and we do get a faint flavour, more than we get from departed musicians. Paganini and Dr. 1'epusch might never have been ; and yet, paradoxically, with actresses it is the voice that most counts, so we know that however vivid the biography, we have lost the greater part. I never saw Sarah Bernhardt, but I did see an old woman, a splendid wreck, playing Luerezia Borgia, and remember nothing of her appearance (except the red wig), or of her acting ; but I shall never forget that voice, even though it was an old woman's voice, bell-like, mellow, flexible, with an incom- parable tone. The play was the voice. And apparently with Fanny Kemble it was the same. She was extraordinarily irregular and temperamental in her acting, as Sarah was, but she could do everything with her tones. Even in old age, long after she had retired, rattling home in a cab after seeing, a play, she would delight her companions by showing, with her voice alone, how far the performance had fallen short. In fact, she was probably a better reader than an actress, and much of her fame, and income, arose from the Shakespeare readings which she gave to crowded audiences in England and America. Would anybody go to Shake- speare reading now ? Alas, no. We have lost the sense of dramatic literature, and have acquired what we are assured is far superior, a "sense of the theatre."
Fanny Kemble, however, was not an actress from choice: she hated the stage, all its artistic compromises, its sordid side, its racket and tinsel ; she could not bear to make up. Although her grandparents were famous Kembles, her uncle John Philip and her father Charles Kemble, while her aunt was Mrs. Siddons, she had no desire to emerge as an actress : when the family fortunes sank she pined to become a governess ! That, however, would hardly add much to the Kembk exchequer, sunk in the vast abyss of the new Covent Garden theatre (Fanny was born in the middle of the "Old Prices" riots), btit a stage success would. She therefore achieved the stage success. London fell in love with her. But still it would not do, and her father decided they must go to America. And America fell in love with her. Every- body on both sides of the Atlantic said—but no, that is not for us ; that is the '37 claret again. She, however, did not at first like the Americans as much as her own people, except for a Mr. Pierce Butler of Philadelphia, a most assiduous wooer, who turned out, alas, after marriage, to be no American, but a Turk. He objected to his wife's playwriting, he laughed' at her idea that a wife should be, or could be, her husband's companion ; not at all the sort of attitude Fanny had imbibed from young Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Hallam and Mr. Monckton Milnes, who had been her intimates in London; - And •besides, - Butler was a 'Georgian slave-owner, and Fanny, revolted to the core, could not tactfully repress her views on slavery. She fled to London, leaving two daughters behind, and to make money once more appeared on the stage, and then took to her famous readings. Her husband divorced her, but London made no bones about accepting that divorcée; and when her children came of age she saw them again. And soon her husband died, and she went to live in America, very happy with her children, one of whom became the mother of Owen Wister, scribbling her memoirs, or rather, tapping them out oil one of those new-fangled printing machines. In the end, since one of her daughters married an Englishman, she come back to London, met her old friends such as Carlyle, and died comfortably in old age in 1898.
Mrs. de Bear Bobbe is to be congratulated on a thorough piece of research. She has spared no pains to find out all she could, and it is all here—distressingly all here. She produces enough interesting material to make us trudge along with her to the end, and she never offends by any silly flippancy or vulgarity. She sympathizes with her subject, she respects her ; but then, it is a photograph she gives us, not a painting. It is perhaps curmudgeonly to grumble, but one cannot help wishing that she had selected more stringently, and had given us rather fewer than 337 large pages on a subject which really will not stand so much. Mrs. Bobbe has a certain skill in arranging her material, but none in the handling of words, in varying either the pace, the incidence of a paragraph, or the intensity of emotion. There is too much everyday about it. Oh que to vie eat quotidienne ! true enough ! But then a biography is a work of literature, of art. This sort of thing is life : " . . Early that summer she said good-bye to England, and to Scotland—to her beloved Edinburgh, to Liverpool and to Manchester.
She said good-bye to her mother, her little sister, and her brothers."
All the book is not altogether like that, but there is a good deal too much of simply slapping down the obvious or unim- portant before our flagging attention.
M. Reynaldo Hahn's little book of reminiscences of Sarah Bernhardt is the reverse of all this : it errs, if anything, in the other direction. It is the kind of thing only a Frenchman would dare to do, so flimsy, with so little, apparently, to it ; and yet, somehow, satisfying. But then M. Huhn is a considerable artist in his own sphere of music, and he was the friend of Marcel Proust ; thus he gives us a curious vision of Sarah, transparent, like one of those mother-of- pearl engravings through which the light shines. Not that one fails to get the impression of the bruyant bodily and mental character of the vital Franco-Dutch Jewess, her extraordinary vividness, her amusing impulses, her astonishing lies, and her chromatic gestures—as when she told the coni- pletely fabulous story of the replete boa-constrictor she had bought for a footstool, and which she had had to shoot when she found that it was not, after all, so replete as the man: she had bought it from had represented. The difference. between the two books is that we feel we know Sarah, have been in her presence ; and -Fanny, well, we have seen photo-,. graphs of Fanny. The pity is that the translation of M.. Bahn's racy. sketch does not inspire us with any faith.
BONAIIr DOBRRE.
Previous page
