Originally published in Fraser's Magazine (James Fraser) vol.3 #18 (Jul 1831).
A miserable controversy has been going forward among some of the best guides of public opinion, as to whether Mrs. Siddons deserved the honours of a public funeral, and a "snug lying in Westminster Abbey."
In France, where every thing is dramatic, they refused to bury even Moliere in consecrated ground—in England, we appear to be not quite so angry with the histrionics—we only refuse to admit them into the more theatrical of our sepultures.
The thing is hardly worth wasting paper upon. Let us merely remark that, in France, the objection comes from their clergy—notoriously illiberal in every sense of the word—and, in England, from the press, which is the pink and pattern of liberalism.
We may turn to other things. The craft of an actor, we are told, is low and mechanical, because he has only to represent the ideas of others—because, do what he will, he does no more than perform what a superior mind has dictated. There is, of course, some truth in this description of an actor's labours, but it is not very much to the purpose.
We shall not go over again all that Aristotle, and others, in Grecian times, have told us, about the merits of [GREEK]—or re-write in commonplace English, the magnificent Latin commonplaces of Cicero, in the case of Roscius—but the art of acting is, like all other arts, bottomed upon the power of imitation. There is nothing whatever, in the face or figure of an every-day lord, or a couple of boors-drinking on the head of a cask, or a handful of herrings, or a tumbling-down street in a perishing town, or a couple of fellows cheating one another, or trying to do so, at cards; or a Whig cabinet, or a group of thieves; and yet pictures by Teniers or Lawrence, of these most paltry things, are regarded, and justly regarded, as matters deserving of the highest applause. In like manner, in acting, the performer may have to represent only the thoughts of others, but the real question will be, how that is done?
Away, however, with this special pleading, on what every body feels. A great theatrical performer is a great genius. Every generation, or rather every second generation, produces one actor. Six generations have scarcely passed away since an actress has at all graced our boards; and in these six Mrs. Siddons stands alone. We deny not the merit of our Garricks, Quins, Kembles, Keans—we grant to them all the excellence which their most devoted admirer could demand; and yet we maintain, that the combination of talent requisite to produce a great actress in the higher walks of the drama, is far greater than what can be claimed by an actor of the same standing. We, of course, limit this praise to the power of representing the sterner characters, because in other departments the natural graces of woman, beauty, elegance, enchantment of voice, and other feminine fascinations, go far of themselves to give a lady a rank in her profession in the secondary characters, though a style of acting equal to hers would be intolerable in a male performer.
Since Mrs. Siddons has left the stage we have had no queen of tragedy. We say this with perfect recollection of Miss O'Neil, and with a due admiration of the pathetic powers of that distinguished actress. But in her pathetic only could she be set up as a rival to her great predecessor. The melancholy beauty of her face, her fine and melting eyes, the penetrating pathos of her tones, fitted her for parts where suffering, supplication, unhappy love, were to be depicted. This is no small praise. But where the emotions were of a loftier range, where terror, not pity, predominated, where the Æschylian heroine came upon the stage, there she failed, or, as in the times of her more successful career, shrunk altogether from the attempt. She could, in Constance, supplicate for her son, and never was supplication more touching, or more tender; but when Constance rises to denounce the perfidy of princes, and to heap malisons upon the leagues and wars of kings, then we missed the superior genius whose voice inspired dread, whose glance was that of command.
One wonderful conception of Shakspeare—Lady Macbeth—was Mrs. Siddons's alone. We ne'er, in all probability, shall look upon its like again; for Nature seldom indulges in the freak of producing two such actresses in the same half-century. We well remember the harrowing energy with which the ambitious lady urged forward the reluctant Thane—the dreadful eloquence of eye and gesture with which she tempted him to forget all the horrors of crime by its golden and glorious consequences—the firm determination of mien, which spoke that perfect conquest over her own feelings which she had obtained, and the inflexible resolution to obtain her prize, no matter what it cost—and the deadly agonies of that awful sleepwalking scene, in which conscience, no longer overmastered by the mental power which was then lulled into repose, spoke forth its terrors. No lady who ever trod the boards could body forth these conceptions of the poet but Mrs. Siddons—none represent the stern composure of mind, which, in the midst of horrors, never swerved a moment from its bloody resolutions. One passage still lingers upon our ear as distinctly, as when in years long bygone it first thrilled upon them. When Macbeth, horror-struck at the proposed murder of Duncan, and ready to draw back from attempting it, suggests the possibility of failure, he says, in desponding tone,
"If we should fail"—
the reply is,
"We fail!"—
As commonly acted, as indeed Mrs. Siddons herself for some years performed it, these words are made an indignant question, with the emphasis upon the pronoun.
"If we should fail—
WE fail?"
"Is it possible that we could fail—do not fancy any thing so absurd." Far different was the reading of her more mature years.
"If we should fail,"
says Macbeth, in his last hope that the prospect of the ruin and dishonour attendant upon failure would terrify his wife, whom he had already found insensible to all other considerations of pity, remorse, loyalty, or generosity. In a deep, but perfectly tranquil tone came the reply—it barely filled up the sentence—
"If we should fail—
"We fail."
"Well—we may fail, and what then? I have determined on playing a game, and must submit to the chances of ill success."
The deadly indifference to the result was spoken in the cold and almost-careless style of the answer; contempt for him who thought that a possibility of the want of success should be an apology for not being "in act and valour as in desire," flashed from her eyes. But as the enterprize could not be carried without his co-operation, she immediately hastens to remove that last objection. For herself she was contented to run all risks in aiming at the crown; and failure, with all its concomitants, had no terrors for her. "We fail,"—be it so! I have at least gloriously attempted. This was for herself.
"But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail."
"If you act boldly, success is certain. The prize you look for may be obtained without danger." This was for him. No words, however, can convey any adequate idea of this great piece of acting, in which, by three or four simple words, the superiority of the mind of Lady Macbeth, both in strength and in wickedness, over that of her husband, is depicted with a force and a distinctness which volumes of declamation or reams of criticism would fail to effect.
But we had no notion of writing critiques on Mrs. Siddons's acting when we began to write these two or three hasty pages. We believe that we may take it for granted there will not be many dissentients on the subject. She was the greatest tragic actress of England. Abroad we do not know whom we should bring to be compared with her, with the single exception of Pasta, who, we fear not to say it, is as great in tragedy as she is in song. The question then arises, are those honours which we have been in the habit of paying to the memory of those whose genius has honoured and illustrated our country, to be denied to her remains, if they be demanded. We think not. The time is gone by since it could be pleaded that the politics of the author of Paradise Lost ought to exclude him from the depository sacred to our illustrious dead. In fact, although the objection was urged by a Dean, and a very clever and learned Dean moreover, he had not the most reverent notion of what is consecrated ground. There is nothing in Westminster Abbey, canonically considered, more sacred than in the lowliest burying ground. The humble resting-place where—
"The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,"
is as sacred a spot as that which enshrines the embalmed relics of kings and princes—it has been blessed by the same rites, opened with the same solemn ceremonies, prayed over from the same liturgy, and watered most certainly by far sincerer tears. He who from degrading causes is unworthy of lying in Westminster Abbey, is unworthy of lying in consecrated ground at all. But this objection will be hardly started now. There is nothing necessarily attaching itself to the embodying in act the conceptions of Shakspeare that can degrade the character or debase the mind. In Mrs. Siddons's case we are sure that her mind was heightened and improved by the perpetual identifying herself with the proudest emanations of the greatest genius that ever wrote. Her life, always pure and blameless, was rendered more scrupulous, and even lofty, by the proud consciousness that she was the living representative of Shakspeare's heroines. This being allowed, if it still be urged that, say what we like, she was only an actress, we have nothing to offer in reply. It will be only a proof that the spirit of old Prynne is not yet extinct, and that some still continue to be of the opinion of that old Histriomastix, who contended gravely that all actresses should suffer the fate of Jezebel, and be torn to pieces by dogs, because, like her, they painted their faces.
We need not fear that Westminster Abbey will be troubled by many similar applications. Since the days when Davenant first introduced women on the stage, to the present moment, Mrs. Siddons is the only lady for whom we should claim the honour. How far is she in all the attributes of genius superior to all but the half dozen great names now treasured there—how much above the rabble of gentlemen, who, because they wrote with ease rhymes without poetry, or prose without a thought, have been embalmed among poets and philosophers—how much more useful in her generation than many of the second rate or fifth rate soldiers or sailors there admitted! It is a queer world in which we live, when the greatest genius that ever graced a difficult intellectual pursuit, a lady admitted on all hands to be supereminent in her line, is considered as unworthy of a place in a church where stands a statue of Francis Horner, a sterile brained writer of quackery in forgotten reviews. Nobody objects to honouring the political economist, who drugged the readers of the Edinburgh Review with narcotical essays upon currency—it is a question whether a similar compliment should be paid to her on whose tongue thousands hung enchanted, and who impressed the divinest of poetry on the souls of a nation. It seems as if it were considered a more glorious feat to compose a report for a blundering Bullion Committee, whose names are already consigned to oblivion, than to be the inspired living commentator on Shakspeare, and to represent the creations of the mind of him who
"Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new,"
with genius fully responsive to his own.
But so it is. No honour, however, will be lost to Mrs. Siddons. The fame of a player is the most transitory, and succeeding generations must take her fame upon trust from us, who are now the rapidly declining number of her contemporaries. But it will survive, as Garrick's has survived, without being diminished in the slightest, because she lies in an obscure churchyard in Paddington, instead of a marble sepulchre in Westminster Abbey.