" MACBETH" AT THE LYCEUM.
BLINID eritic would hardly think Mr. Irving's "Macbeth" a very fine performance, though there are scenes in it which even-lie would consider of the very highest power ; a deaf man Who'knew the play well enough to follow it in dumb show, would be thrilled to the heart with the extraordinary variety and intensity Of his face and eye and gestures, while even such a one might depre- cate the restlessness of his stage-strut. He who can both see and hear is somewhat confounded with the complexity of his impres- sions,—for there is in Mr. Irving's acting a residuum of staginess at which bne is puzzled when one notes the simplicity and grandeur with which he gives many passages in the play. On the whole, Mr. Irving's seems to-us a very fine, and true, and original interpreta- tion of Shakespeare's conception,—much finer than Macready's,— though a good deal spoiled here and there by the hold over his mind still retained by the conventional rant of tyrannical stage traditions ;while of Miss Bateman's Lady Macbeth we should say that there was but one great fault in it, the banquet scene, where she acts her remonstrances and expostulations with her husband on his eccentric and inexplicable behaviour with as little reserve and regard to the presence of her guests as even Macbeth himself—who is mentally alone with his supernatural terrors even in the midst of all that party—displays. There are two pieces of acting in the play,—one of Mr. Irving's and one of Miss Bateman's,—which appear to us hardly to admit of being surpassed even by the greatest dramatic genius. But on the whole, Miss Bateman's Lady Macbeth had perhaps both fewer faults and less striking originality than Mr. Irving's impersonation of the imaginative assassin.
There is a peculiarity in Shakespeare's conception of the chief character in this grand play which Mr. Irving's genius to some extent seizes, and seizes very finely, but then, again, in very
critical places, seems quite to miss. The play of Mac- beth is clearly not meant to turn mainly on the subject of bloody ambition, and the preternatural gloom in which it ends, but on characteristics much more subtle. Mr. Irving rightly sees that the diabolic assurances and solicitings to which Shakespeare has given so powerful and fantastic an embodiment are of the very essence of the play,—that it is to the spirit of Macbeth that the spirit of evil addresses itself, first in vague and shapeless schemes of blood, hidden apparently in his own brain, or confided only to his wife, and then in the distincter form of preternatural divinations and promises which inflame his hesitating and foreboding nature by kindling its first belief in the proba- bility of complete success. But it is most remarkable that the strangely vivid imagination which paints so powerfully,— even in images of flame,—the terrors of conscience and the threatenings of spiritual wrath, never once dwells on the objects of this lawless ambition, or lures him into murder and treachery by filling him with visions of the untested joys of power. As far as Shakespeare's play shows hint, Macbeth's won- derful imagination stands wholly in his way, is the one permanent drag on his insatiable greed of power. It is by virtue of her de- ficiency in this imagination that his wife surpasses him in capability and resolve. In no single case is it the fire of Macbeth's imagination which precipitates him into crime. On the contrary, it paralyses him much ; it disturbs and confounds him much ; but it never propels him. But for the witches, he would never have had faith enough in success to venture on the assassination of Duncan. It is they who throughout gave him that confidence in the tangibility of his hopes, of which his imaginative vision would otherwise have utterly deprived him. Had not they hailed him King of Scotland, and verified their insight by the anticipation of his ele- vation to the thanedom of Cawdor, he would not have dared to murder Duncan. Had they not assured him that he was invincible till Birnam Wood should come to Dunsinane, and proof against all men born of women, he would not have dared openly to defy all his former friends, and to work his bloody will on all his rivals. The absolute and persevering credulity with which he accepts the diabolic promises is no less remarkable than the fidelity with which his own imagination foreshadows all. the horrors of a guilty conscience and a haunted life. While his imagination scares and draws him back, his credulous superstition provides him with just enough hold on the future to go on. With him, as with Hamlet, imaginative power is a solvent, not a stimulus to action ; but while Hamlet is imaginative enough to distrust the Ghost, Macbeth catches eagerly at the pledge of pre- ternatural knowledge which the witches give him, and leans heavily on it throughout his career of crime. His imagination never pictures in glowing colours the prizes at which he aims, but only embarrasses him in grasping at them. There is no vision, no reverie in Macbeth's appetite for power and revenge ; the mere access of his mood of reverie appears to awaken his whole moral and intellectual nature, and to make him see the satisfactions
of his bloody desires as mere single threads in the complex web of consequences which he forecasts.
Now, how far does Mr. Irving reflect this characteristic in his act- -ing ? Sometimes most powerfully. In his soliloquy before the second scene with Lady Macbeth, and in that scene itself, his imagina- tion presents all the doubts, difficulties, all the dissuasive motives with a force which makes you realise how true it is that with him "I dare not" waits upon "I would." His mental picture of how
"Pity, like a naked new-born babe Striding the blast, or Heaven's cherubin horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind,"
is wonderfully fine and paralysing to his wicked purpose in its pathos. Mr. Irving makes all his hearers feel that in his imagina- tion he has "no spur to prick the sides of his intent," but on the contrary, a most powerful curb to restrain its eagerness. But then he ought to listen without excitement or remark to Lady Mac- beth's very truculent speech as to what she would have done with the baby at her breast, had she so Sworn as her husband has done. This to Macbeth is a mere imaginative expression of feeling in which he could easily cap her, if he were in the vein ; Shakespeare makes him cut it short with the-curt objection," But if we fail ?" It has no special interest for him. But when, on the other hand, in her direct, practical way, Lady Macbeth goes to the tletails of the murder, from which his vivid imaginative horror of the deed makes him recoil till he dare. not devise a plan of what fills him with such a tempest of dread, and seggests how to drug the guards, and mark them with all the signs of guilt, his admiration of her breaks forth in the words, " Bring forth men-children only." Now here Mr. Irving seems to us utterly to fail. His face works during his Wife's epee& about tearing the baby from her breast, as if that deeply stirredlim,—wherea,s he should cat it short impatiently ; and then when the murder is put in a practical shape before him, instead of being surprised into a tribute of admiration, he rants it as if it were a bit of eloquence, whereas it is extorted from hi h by his wonder at the directness with which his wife goes to the details of a crime which he can contemplate at all only through the cloudy atmosphere of a vague and irrepressible horror. She provides him with "a spur to the sides of his intent" almost as powerful E48 the witches had provided him, by making him see exactly how the deed can_ come about, and bringing down his rambling imagination from its fearful flights. "Bring forth men-children only" ought to be spoken as the sailor would speak to the pilot who had suddenly re- cognised the familiar land gleaming through a blinding mist which had been too much for his less experienced sight. As the deed shapes itself to him through her, his murderous design embodies itself in it, and his imaginative terrors for the moment are driven from the field. But Mr. Irving, instead of marking this sudden descent of Macbeth's mind from poetry to prose, and admiration for the naked and bloody directness of the counsellor who can thus strip his conceptions of their vagueness and obscurity of form, gives the passage as if it were a new burst of eloquence, rather than an act of involuntaryhomage to homely murderousness of purpose. Then, after the murder, Mr. Irving rises again to the full height of the imaginative horror of himself which possesses Macbeth. It is hardly possible that any one who has ever seen should ever for- get the terror with which he describes the voice that cried, "Sleep no more ! Macbeth does murder sleep." It was the very incar- nation of despair, of the despair of a mental and spiritual hell. No actor who ever played, so far as the present writer can con- -calve of fine acting, could surpass it. There was not a tone of rant in it ; it was the hollow, ghastly, hope-bereft experience of a haunted and blood-stained soul. It was the climax of power in the play. But he falls sadly again in strength in the scene where he breaks to his wife his resolve to murder Banquo, and where he certainly should be sinking more and more into the common ruffian, since his imagination is evidently losing its pre- ternatural delicacy and vividness, and beginning to serve as the mere safety-valve of his murderous anxieties. The next passage in which Mr. Irving rises to the fullest height of his power is in the scene with Lady Macbeth's physician, where the cynical self-
ishness and indifference of his manner in speaking of the mind which had given way under the pressure of remorse, and the pre- dominance of his contempt for the medical helplessness of the physician, are very finely given. At the passage,—
" Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coining fancies That keep her from rest," Macbeth's cold and imperious "Cure her of that" is marvellously fine. Mr. Irving there catches the selfish mood of the tyrant who cares more for the danger to himself in what his wife may say, than for any peril it may imply to his helpmate in crime, with a power that thrills the hearer. Equally fine is the cold and hitter remark on hearing of the Queen's death :—
"She ehonld have died hereafter ;
There would have been time for such a word.- To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded Time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death."
And again, as all the critics have noticed, in the last scene of all, where he is driven to bay, the fierce animal courage of the man comes out with splendid power, in a moment when violent action Arives away all the imaginative terrors of his haunted life. But splendid as some of these scenes are, there is a great deal more common rant in the intervals than is at all fitting in an imperson- ation of such real genius.
Miss Bateman's performance of Lady Macbeth is particularly fine in bringing out the limitation of the unscrupulous 'woman's mind, which can see none of those larger con- -sequences of crime that are so terribly real to her hus- band. The way in which she shrinks aghast at the thickening .of the fearful anticipations which crowd upon him immediately after the murder, and is utterly cowed on finding a class of con- sequences for which she had never reckoned,—she had counted -on suspicion, and acCuaation, and danger from others, but not on the unsettling of her husband's own reason, and the inward misery which he was bringing on himself,—is perfect. The hesitating way in which she suggests that "man's image" in Banque and his son is not " eterne," as compared with the eager and fierce solicitude with which she had pressed on her husband the awarder of Duncan, is admirably marked. Indeed, she collapses visibly in nerve and audacity as his conscience grows more seared and his passion more cruel. Nothing can be finer than the manner in which she asks fearfully, "What's to be done ?" and -acquiesces almost thankfully when he replies, with a sort of coarse tenderness to his accomplice in murder, "Be inno- ,cent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud -the deed," and it is evident that very little of active ap- plause will now be in her heart to give. She is learn- log by a frightful experience all that her husband knew by the force of his imaginative insight, and while he grows fiercer and less scrupulous every day, she is feeling the burden heavier and the weight at her heart less and less supportable. The sleep-
walking scene is, too, almost as fine as it could be. The inwardness of her voice is that of one who is talking to visions in her own brain. The horror of the tone in which she expresses her wonder that the old man had" so much blood in him," and the inexpressible anguish of her sigh as she observes that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand," gave us a thrill as keen as Mr. Irving's accent in describing the voice which proclaimed that Macbeth had murdered sleep ;—itisimpossible to judge which of the two delineations of despakisthe higher, for both are perfect. Miss Bateman's only ill-success seems to us to be in the Banquet scene, a very difficult scene to act, and one in which, as it appeared to us, both Mr. Irving and Miss Bateman failed. Of the other actors, the less, perhaps, said the better. Bat In truth, there are hardly any other parts to act, except Banquo's, which is not particularly well rendered here. Lady Macbeth's "doctor," however, does his part simply, seriously, and well. The scenic effects, and the arrangements for the preternatural scenes especially, are very finely managed. It is a pity that the actors who represent the witches cannot be got to understand, that if such creatures as these existed at all, they certainly would not rant, since true malignity, just because it is fierce, and even furious, is far too much in earnest to rant.
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