THE THEATRE.
THE SICILIANS.
A FEW weeks ago an attempt was made in this column to appraise the acting of Mr. Beerbohm Tree, to analyse its nature, and to indicate the principal faults and merits inherent in the species of art of which it is representative. Mr. Tree's acting suggests, in more ways than one, a com- parison with that of the Sicilian Players, whose vigorous and vivid representations of Italian peasant life are drawing full houses at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Like Mr. Tree, these Sicilian actors are primarily concerned with gesticulation ; they appeal first and foremost to the eye, and there could be no clearer proof of their mastery of the arts of physical expression than the ease with which they convey to an English audience the developments of a drama spoken in the unfamiliar dialect of Sicily. Indeed, it is impossible not to feel that even Mr. Tree, with all his command of gesture and facial play, might learn a good deal upon these matters from the Sicilians. After them, bow insignificant and tame appear his most elaborate grimaces, his most melodramatic ravings ! He seems to be struggling with his utmost force and skill to achieve effects which come easily, and almost naturally, to Signor Grasso and Signorina Aguglia. And perhaps no English actor or actress, however gifted, could hope to rival, in intensity of physical expressiveness, these hot-blooded children of the South. It is not only that with us the use of gesture, instead of being instinctive and habitual, is a thing to be laboriously learnt ; it can hardly be doubted that there is a deeper difference,—a difference in nervous organisation, in the closeness and swiftness of the correspondence between body and mind. To use the language of science, the Sicilian physique answers far more readily than ours to mental stimuli. They express their feelings, not by the face alone, but by the entire frame; in their climaxes of passion, not a muscle of their bodies remains unmoved; their very feet shiver with emotion ; the joints of their thumbs turn back- wards, writhing, almost to the wrist. Such intense and extreme manifestations of feeling lie—by the very nature of the case—beyond the reach of a Teutonic pantomimist like Mr. Tree.
The superiority of the Sicilians, however, does not depend merely upon the violence of their expressive force ; it depends no less on the nature of the feelings which they express. If our analysis was correct, Mr. Tree fails to produce truly fine and permanent effects because he attempts to give expression to subtle emotions and complex states of mind by means of crude and obvious gesture. His treatment of Shakespeare affords the clearest instance of this defect, and the same cause tends to make his presentments of modern.life stagy and unconvincing. But with the Sicilians the case is very different. The material out of which, so to speak, they weave their acting is something totally dissimilar both to the imaginative intellectuality of Shakespeare and to the refined self-con- sciousness of the civilised society of to-day: it is the rough, direct, and primitive existence of the ignorant peasants of the Abruzzi or the simple hill-folk of Sicily. In a word, the emotions with which they deal are precisely those for which vivid physical action is the only appropriate expression. Here are no complexities and hesitations, no hints and delicacies, no gradual transitions of feeling, no subtleties of thought ; here everything is simple even to childishness, and straightforward even to brutality. A man flies into a temper with his companion, and immediately slaps his face ; the next moment he repents, and kisses him. And in the deeper passions, the greater movements of the soul, there is the same directness and the same swift and violent simplicity. Signorina Aguglia's animalic paroxysms remind one, by sheer force of contrast, of the exquisite refinements of Signora Duse's art, and one begins to wonder how it is that the same race should have produced such opposites. Charles Lamb in his criticism of The Duchess of lifalfi speaks of the noble spirituality of Webster's tragedy, and points out bow that great artist was able "to move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life until it is ready to drop " ; and adds that "writers of an inferior genius may 'upon horror's head horrors accumulate' but they cannot do this They mistake quantity for quality their terrors want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum." It is over this latter province—the province of accumulated horrors—that the Sicilian actress reigns supreme. Doubtless it is not the highest form of tragedy ; it is true that her terrors want dignity, and that her affrightments are without decorum; but she has brought these things under the spell of a most potent art, and she has made them the instruments of no mean triumph. The spectacle which she presents of a mind —or should we rather say a body P—given over to the last extremities of unmixed passion—of love, or hatred, or jealousy, or terror, or despair—must send a thrill through the coldest, and impress the most obtuse. It is natural that a superficial criticism should compare Signorina Aguglia with Madame Bernhardt; but in reality any such comparison must be fruitless. Their merits cannot be weighed in the same scales. Madame Bernhardt is before all things a dweller in cities; in her most electric moments she is still civilised ; when she is most frenzied she never loses her grace; and at her best she can assume the "dignity" and the " decorum " of the grand style itself. Curiously enough, the fundamental situation of the central scene in Maio corresponds almost exactly with that of one of the great scenes in Phedre,—a scene in which, perhaps, Madame Bernhardt appears at her finest. The subject of both is a woman's declaration of a shameful passion to the object of it. Madame Bernhardt shows us the mind of Racine's heroine, delirious and desperate as it is, yet possessed of a high consciousness, an imaginative grasp of the irony of the situation, and a splendid magnanimity. There is nothing of all this in Signorina Aguglia's Iana,—a half-savage creature possessed of devils, torn in pieces by the bare violence of shame and of desire, unsupported by the reticences of conven- tion, and unsoothed by the nobilities of thought. The excess of horror let loose and rampant upon a human being,—that is a terrible sight to look upon, perhaps too terrible. Who that saw it did not wish, for a moment, to cry out, so that the dreadful thing might stop But, after all, these performances are not all terror; they possess the other ingredient of tragedy,—there is pity in them too. It is this that mitigates the hideous crudity of certain passages, and brings some sense of gentleness into the whole. The actors are not cold-hearted dissectors of passion, but men and women who feel and know. No one could doubt that who has seen the look of awful grief in Iana's face as she sits plucking to pieces, with the automatic energy of desperation, the flower she holds in her hand, or who has witnessed the agonised stumblings of the witch in La Figlia di Jerk., when she has fallen into her persecutor's power. Enough has been said to show that these actors are by no means the rough-and-ready performers which, from a hasty con- sideration of the primitive nature of the scenes they depict, they might be supposed to be. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are brilliant and accomplished to a high degree. Signorina Aguglia rises undoubtedly to greatness; and it is rare indeed to see on an English stage an exhibition of such easy power, such consummate mastery of the technique of acting, as is shown by Signor Grasso. The rest of the company e.r on the side of a too strict adherence to conventional methods, if they err at all. The old men, for instance, are a little too much what every one
would expect old men to be; and the grouping of the minor characters is occasionally over-rigid. But, on the whole, the effect of movement and vitality produced in these pieces is truly amazing. Every actor appears to be overflowing with the vigour of youth. The vivacity and abounding energy of some of the crowded scenes suggest to the mind the great " Kermesse" of Rubens. The spectator is wonderfully exhilarated; he seems to be drinking, at its very source, of
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