FOUR MONOGRAPHS.* As a rule, there is no piece of
literature more short-lived than an article in a magazine or quarterly ; and very often such an article deserves long life and general reading. It has probably meant a good deal of research, and what is really difficult, a good deal of artistic choice of material and careful condensation. When the author is a person of literary skill, whose touch is sufficient to make any subject, even a dry subject, interesting and readable, the swift burial of his work among the pages of an old magazine is very much to be regretted, not for his sake alone.
In the case of these four articles, which Sir Theodore Martin has wisely rescued from remote back numbers of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, this kind of consideration seems to apply exactly. They meant a great deal of original study, selection and condensation. Not one of them is on a dry subject, though two of them are more naturally interesting than the other two. Put together, they make a volume decidedly more readable than the majority of circulating-library books, yet which might have been improved by a greater unity of subject. If some other great actor or actress could have taken Baron Stockmar's place in company with Garrick, Macready, and Rachel, the book would have been in better proportion and simply delightful. As it is, he weighs a little heavily at the end. A most respectable person to whom England owes much, and for the praise of whom there is no one better endowed than Sir Theodore Martin, one asks what he is doing between the same covers with his companions. And yet there are very interesting points in Baron Stockmar's life of which readers who care for the details of English history may like to be reminded. It may be sometimes for- gotten that Stockmar, the Prince Consort's mentor, through- out his life the friend of Leopold, might with his high medical skill have saved the unhappy Princess Charlotte. She and Prince Leopold had been anxious to appoint him one of her physicians. Probably, as Sir Theodore Martin says, he had
* Monographs: Garrick, Macready, Rachel, and Baron Stock-mar. By Sir
Theodore Martin, S.C.V.O. London : John Murray. [12a. net.]
excellent reasons for declining the honour. After the fatal event, he was glad for his own sake that he had done so. And yet one cannot help thinking that there were moments when he regretted his own self-chosen helplessness. He disap- proved from the first of the treatment adopted by the Princess's special doctors. He even remonstrated with them through the Prince, but naturally with no avail, for he had, wisely or not, deprived himself of the right to give an opinion. Whatever we may think of the final consequences for England, all this adds an extra touch of sadness to the tragic story, which has always had a certain background of doubt and mystery.
We have already said that the monograph on Baron Stockmar is the least interesting in the book. Next to this, on a rising scale, we should place that on William Charles Macready,—not that he was a more interesting personality, certainly not that he was a finer character, but because of his relative value compared with the other two subjects, connected with him but so far more picturesque and striking. There was a time when the English public thought a great deal of Macready, and it kept a very real respect for him down to the close of his long life. He did much by his example to raise the tone of theatrical life as far as morals were concerned, and in other ways to dignify the English stage. People learned with surprise from the " Diaries " published in 1875— perhaps unfortunately for his fame, though Edward Fitz- Gerald did not think so—that there hardly ever had been an actor more egotistic, more jealous for his own reputation or grudging as to that of his colleagues :-
"The echo of applause, unless given to himself, fills him with
envious and vindictive feelings.' The words are his own No generous emulation, no triumph in the general exaltation of the drama, no delight in the display of genius or power in others, would compensate his hunger for exclusive predominance, for the comparative eclipse of his own star."
It is an unamiable picture, and, as we know from other sources, by no means invariably true. Macready could be a kind, generous, and helpful friend to his fellow-actors.
And some knowledge of his early life goes far to explain the weaknesses of his character. He was an actor made, not born. He was almost forced upon the stage, too familiar to his youth, by his father's misfortunes, and there is something very fine in the early struggles of the young manager of sixteen. If he had no real genius for acting—Sir Theodore Martin denies it to him—he certainly worked at the art as hard as any man ever did, and raised himself by strength of will to a very high position. The fact that his heart was never really in it accounts to some extent for the partial souring of his nature as far as his theatrical life was concerned. Outside it he was a man of many good qualities and of " admirable judgment."
There are few actors whose portrait would not appear colourless beside that of David Garrick. Here indeed was an actor born, not made. It is not always remembered that this star in England's theatrical world is one of the debts she owes to France : though he was born an Englishman, the son of an officer in the Dragoons, he was only one generation removed from his French extraction. His grandfather, who spelt his name Garric or Garrique, was one of those who fled to England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. England gained greatly by that act of short-sighted tyranny, and Garrick was not the least of her gains. Many of his qualities were those of the best among Frenchmen. His sprightly looks and pleasant manners, his ease of expression, his force and fervour, his modesty and unselfishness, his kind heart and good temper and " constant gaiety," combined with self-restraint and common-sense, to all of which qualities his contemporaries bear witness, make a charming character which even Dr. Johnson's English prejudices and English roughness found irresistible. He was always snarling and scoffing at Garrick, his early pupil and companion in fortune- seeking, and some of his ill-natured sayings have been pre- served to give a false impression of the man, but " he would suffer no one else to speak ill of him." Garrick had, no doubt, the faults of his qualities, and many of them were specially evident to Englishmen who did not quite under- stand him. But the truth seems to be that his lovableness as a man was on a par with his supremacy as an actor. It is impossible that an actor-manager should not make hundreds of enemies. People accuse him of being partial, jealous, self-interested, severe. Every actor who thinks himself fit for a great part is enraged by being offered a small one. Every dramatic writer whose play is refused thinks his critic blind, if not worse. Horace Walpole was a type of the latter class when he wrote of exposing himself " to the impertinences of that jackanapes Garrick " with regard to his play, The Mysterious Mother. And yet at another time he called Garrick his "esteemed friend." But Garrick in his time was quite as well abused as any manager who ever lived. This article is an excellent study both of the man himself and his greatness in his art. There exists, we believe, no really good standard Life of Garrick. It is a piece of work well worth doing, but requires rather rare faculties and a great deal of special knowledge.
The story of Rachel, as Sir Theodore Martin tells it, has a greater fascination for us than either of the other studies in this book. He does full justice to its pathetic, Bohemian charm. In the history of the stage there are few things more interesting and curious than the beginnings of the little Jewish girl, poor, thin, hungry, singing with her sister in the streets. The pale, plain face, full of intelligence and of suffering, touched young Victor Hugo as he walked through the Place Royale, and " he dropped a five-franc piece into the younger girl's hand," while some one close by mentioned his name. Long afterwards, when Victor Hugo and herself had reached their heights of fame, Rachel used to tell the story.
Of course, in spite of her fine acting of Corneille's and Racine's heroines, and of other classical French parts, Rachel was not by nature or education one of those characters who raise and dignify the stage. She must be studied purely as a genius, to whom her art was second nature, who was entirely possessed and dominated by it, and whose life out- side it inspires pity and sorrow. As an actress, to be admired beyond words ; as a woman, one can only echo Dejazet's cry at her funeral :—" Pauvre femme ! Ab, in pauvre femme! "
In the days of her youth Rachel's one passion was " excel- lence in her art." Nothing can be more curiously enchanting than the long extract Sir Theodore Martin gives us from a letter of Alfred de Musset, in which he describes an evening spent at Rachel's rather sordid home after one of her triumphs in Tanerede. She was then perfectly unworldly, thought of nothing but her characters, and was full of a noble and fiery ambition. Afterwards, as everybody knows, she made terrible mistakes in life, and the time came, with a dread of failure in health and power, when she cared for little but the money her successes might bring. The dark days she dreaded were swift in their advance; she died of consumption at thirty-eight, leaving an unsurpassed name among French tragic actresses, and a memory of charm for her many friends; but leaving also a warning, by the sad flaws in her greatness, of "the too often forgotten truth, that to rise to the level of great art, and to keep there, the inner life and the habits of the artist must be worthy, pure and noble." "As an artist," Sir Theodore Martin goes on to say, in the course of some excellent critical remarks on Rachel's powers, "the want of that moral 'element prevented her from rising to the highest level. Had she possessed it, she must have gone on advancing in excellence to the last. But this she did not do."
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