Miss Bretherton. Mrs. Humphry Ward
it, and when I come across anything in life that makes me feel, I will protect my feeling from it with all my might.'
'We are dumb,' said Kendal, with a smile; 'otherwise I would pedantically ask you to consider what are the feelings to which the dramatic art properly and legitimately appeals.'
'Oh, hang your dramatic art,' said Forbes, firing up; 'can't you take things simply and straightforwardly? She is there—she is doing her best for you—there isn't a movement or a look which isn't as glorious as that of a Diana come to earth, and you won't let it charm you and conquer you, because she isn't into the bargain as confoundedly clever as you are yourselves! Well, it's your loss, not hers.'
'My dear Mr. Forbes,' said Mrs. Stuart, with her little judicial peace-making air, 'we shall all go away contented. You will have had your sensation, they will have had their sense of superiority, and, as for me, I shall get the best of it all round. For, while you are here, I see Miss Bretherton with your eyes, and yet, as Edward will get hold of me on the way home, I shan't go to bed without having experienced all the joys of criticism! Oh! but now hush, and listen to this music. It is one of the best things in the evening, and we shall have the White Lady directly.'
As she spoke, the orchestra, which was a good one, and perhaps the most satisfactory feature in the performance, broke into some weird Mendelssohnian music, and when the note of plaintiveness and mystery had been well established, the curtain rose upon the great armoury of the castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and masses of faintly gleaming steel. The scene which followed, in which the Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the Hohenzollerns, whose appearance bodes misfortune and death to those who behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of driving her and those interested in her by sheer force of terror from the castle and from Berlin, had been poetically conceived, and it furnished Miss Bretherton with an admirable opportunity. As the White Lady, gliding between rows of armed and spectral figures on either hand, and startling the Princess and her companion by her sudden apparition in a gleam of moonlight across the floor, she was once more the representative of all that is most poetical and romantic in physical beauty. Nay, more than this; as she flung her white arms above her head, or pointed to the shrinking and fainting figure of her rival while she uttered her wailing traditional prophecy of woe, her whole personality seemed to be invested with a dramatic force of which there had been no trace in the long and violent scene with the Prince. It was as though she was in some sort capable of expressing herself in action and movement, while in all the arts of speech she was a mere crude novice. At any rate, there could be no doubt that in this one scene she realised the utmost limits of the author's ideal, and when she faded into the darkness beyond the moonlight in which she had first appeared, the house, which had been breathlessly silent during the progress of the apparition, burst into a roar of applause, in which Wallace and Kendal heartily joined.
'Exquisite!' said Kendal in Mrs. Stuart's ear, as he stood behind her chair. 'She was romance itself! Her acting should always be a kind of glorified and poetical pantomime; she would be inimitable so.'
Mrs. Stuart looked up and smiled agreement. 'Yes, that scene lives with one. If everything else in the play is poor, she is worth seeing for that alone. Remember it!'
The little warning was in season, for the poor White Lady had but too many after opportunities of blurring the impression she had made. In the great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition. In the two or three fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term 'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of long and complex processes of education. There, indeed, was the bald, plain fact—the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education. It was evident that her technical training had been of the roughest. In all technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air, which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had been of the poorest type. And in all other respects—when it came to interpretation or creation—she was spoilt by her entire want of that inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the present. For an actress must have one of the two kinds of knowledge: she must have either the knowledge which comes from a fine training—in itself the outcome of a long tradition—or she must have the knowledge which comes from mere living, from the accumulations of personal thought and experience. Miss Bretherton had neither. She had extraordinary beauty and charm, and certainly, as Kendal admitted, some original quickness. He was not inclined to go so far as to call it 'power.' But this quickness, which would have been promising in a debutante less richly endowed on the physical side, seemed to him to have no future in her. 'It will be checked,' he said to himself, 'by her beauty and all that flows from it. She must come to depend more and more on the physical charm, and on that only. The whole pressure of her success is and will be that way.'
Miss Bretherton's inadequacy, indeed, became more and more visible as the play was gradually and finely worked up to its climax in the last act. In the final scene of all, the Prince, who by a series of accidents has discovered the Countess Hilda's plans, lies in wait for her in the armoury, where he has reason to know she means to try the effect of a third and last apparition upon the Princess. She appears; he suddenly confronts her; and, dragging her forward, unveils before himself and the Princess the death-like features of his old love. Recovering from the shock of detection, the Countess pours out upon them both a fury of jealous passion, sinking by degrees into a pathetic, trance-like invocation of the past, under the spell of which the Prince's anger melts away, and the little Princess's terror and excitement change into eager pity. Then, when she sees him almost reconquered, and her rival weeping beside her, she takes the poison phial from her breast, drinks it, and dies in the arms of the man for whose sake she has sacrificed beauty, character, and life itself.
A great actress could hardly have wished for a better opportunity. The scene was so obviously beyond Miss Bretherton's resources that even the enthusiastic house, Kendal fancied, cooled down during the progress of it. There were signs of restlessness, there was even a little talking in some of the back rows, and at no time during the scene was there any of that breathless absorption in what was passing on the stage which the dramatic material itself amply deserved.
'I don't think this will last very long,' said Kendal in Wallace's ear. 'There is something tragic in a popularity like this; it rests on something unsound, and one feels that disaster is not far off. The whole thing impresses me most painfully. She has some capacity, of course; if only the conditions had been different—if she had been born within a hundred miles of the Paris Conservatoire, if her youth had been passed in a society of more intellectual weight—but, as it is, this very applause is ominous, for the beauty must go sooner or later, and there is nothing else.'
'You remember Desforêts in this same theatre last year in Adrienne Lecouvreur?' said Wallace. 'What a gulf between the right thing and the wrong! But come, we must do our duty;' and he drew Kendal forward towards the front of the box, and they saw the whole house on its feet, clapping and shouting, and the curtain just being drawn back to let the White Lady and the Prince appear before it. She was very pale, but the storm of applause which greeted her seemed to revive her, and she swept her smiling glance round the theatre, until at last it rested with a special gleam of recognition on the party in the box, especially on Forbes, who was outdoing himself in enthusiasm. She was called forward again and again, until at last the house was content, and the general exit began.
The instant after her white dress had disappeared from the stage, a little page-boy knocked at the door of the box with a message that 'Miss Bretherton begs that Mrs. Stuart and her friends will come and see her.' Out they all trooped, along a narrow passage, and up a short staircase, until a rough temporary door was thrown open, and they found themselves in the wings, the great stage, on which the scenery was being hastily shifted, lying to their right.