The jingling medley of purloined conceits, Out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats.
And Tennyson's answer was even more savage:
What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt,
A dapper boot, a little hand,
If half the little soul is dirt?
Before Mary Anderson appeared I had called on her and done a sketch of her career for the Evening News. She was a tall, graceful, good-looking blonde, but I never dreamed of her huge success. Her mind was as commonplace as her voice. She had no special gift, but on the stage she was beautifuclass="underline" the foot-lights set her off peculiarly, though she could not act for nuts. To compare her as an actress with Ellen Terry or even with Ada Rehan would be ridiculous: she was comparatively inarticulate. Yet her appearances were events; she went from triumph to triumph. Through her success I realized that there are special scenic qualities demanded by the stage. She was very tall and when she came down the stage in white, she dominated it and dwarfed all the other women; in talking she had a slight American accent that would have ruined her as a Shakespearean actress, but by the time she played in The Winter's Tale she had shed her twang and spoke fairly; her eyes were a little deep set, her nose perfectly cut: in a room she was just pretty, on the stage a goddess. How much of her success was due to her statuesque grace and how much to Lytton's passionate advocacy can never be known.
Her career taught me how susceptible the English are to mere physical beauty. They rate it in all animals higher than any other race and study it more intimately: shorthorn bull or Berkshire sow, bulldog or greyhound, terrier or mastiff, Southdown ram or Welsh sheep, race-horse or hunter- all are admired for their perfect conformity to type, which argues a most passionate and imaginative understanding of what type is or should be.
Were it not for their idiotic Puritanism the English would be the greatest sculptors in the world and world-renowned besides for their extraordinary understanding of every form and type of bodily beauty.
I visited the British Museum with Rodin later to study the figures from the Parthenon. He went into ecstasies over them; they were as sensuous, he declared, as any figures in all plastic art. George Wyndham went with me at another time but he would not be seduced. The Greek feet and ankles were too large and ill-shaped, he argued; the womens' necks, too, and breasts were coarse. He preferred the figures from the Temple of Nike Apteros, and even they had bad faults. At length he asserted that the facial type was too wooden: the nose in a straight line from the forehead was ugly. In fine, the best English type, he insisted, was far finer, lovelier at once and more spiritual than the Greek ideal, and I agreed with him.
Europe has learned what natural beauty is from English tourists. Was not Ruskin the first to assert that French trees were far more beautiful than English trees? He did not give the reason, but I may. England is afflicted with a wind from the southwest that blows three hundred odd days each year.
Against this attack all trees when young have to stem themselves or they would be uprooted; as it is, they are dwarfed and crooked. And the woodlands of France suffer from the same plague, though much less severely.
There are no forests in the world to be compared with the American: in half an hour's drive out of New York up the Hudson one sees more varieties of exquisite and well grown trees than one can find in all France, or even Germany.
And as the trees, so are the men and women: one can find more types of exquisite girlhood and splendid manhood in an hour in New York than one can find in a day in London or a week in Paris or Berlin or Moscow. How is it that American athletes hold all the records? How is it that they can run faster and jump higher than any of the English athletes, though the other day the English were supposed to be supreme in all forms of sport and athletics?
In forty years there has not been a single English heavyweight boxer of the first class simply because the mass of the people have been impoverished to a degree that is not yet realized even in England. The physical manhood of the race has been dwarfed by destitution.
But this argument had led me away from my theme. Shortly after my first meeting with Mary Anderson, I saw Tommaso Salvini as Othello. Salvini had every personal qualification: fine presence and in especial a magnificent and perfectly trained voice, now splendidly sonorous, now sweet, always grateful to the ear. The speech containing the lament, "Othello's occupation gone," was never so superbly rendered: the breaking voice, the tears falling from the convulsed face, the hands even knitting and relaxing, formed an unforgettable picture. Salvini at that moment was Othello and when he suddenly turned on Iago he was terrific; but the famous soliloquy in the bed376 chamber before he murders Desdemona was given in far too loud a voice: he would have waked the dead. He had no conception of the complex English passion, that a man can admire, love, even, what he's resolved to destroy, lest "she should sting more men": Shakespeare's own passion, far too complex for the Italian nature. And in Macbeth Salvini had no inkling that he was acting the thought-plagued Hamlet. His Macbeth never hesitates, never falters: he has not the "if 'twere done, when 'tis done," and so forth. Yet he was the best Othello I've ever seen.
Why are actors, like politicians, always over praised? It would take a dozen of the best of them to portray Hamlet to my satisfaction. I should want Irving to look the part, and Forbes-Robertson to recite some of the soliloquies, and Terriss to stab Polonius, and Sarah Bernhardt to send Ophelia to a nunnery with ineffable tenderness; and even then, whom should I get to show the passion of Hamlet's jealousy or the contempt he felt for Kemp, the clown, who gagged probably and did not say the lines set down for him because he was lifted out of himself by the applause of the groundlings; and worst omission of all, who would impersonate the supreme poet who sings of "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns," though he has just been talking to his father's ghost?
It was at a dinner that Arthur Walter gave in his house off Queen's Gate, that I got to know Henry Irving. I had met him before, notably at a supper given by Beerbohm Tree in the Garrick Club after he had played Shylock at the Lyceum.
I had come from Munich to see his Shylock and compare it with the best Shylock I had ever seen, that of Ernst Possart Irving, having been told by Tree that I had come a thousand miles to see him play, was very gracious and hoped I had liked his impersonation. Naturally, I said, "It was very wonderful, but not Shakespeare's-quite!" Irving insisted on knowing what I meant.
Everyone who saw him will remember the scene when Shylock prays to be allowed to go home as a beaten and broken man:
Shy. I pray you give me leave to go from hence I am not well; send the deed after me, And I will sign it.
Duke. Get thee gone, but do it.
Or. In christening shall thou have two godfathers:
Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, To bring thee to the gallows, not the font: (Exit Shylock) It is the only case, I think, in which our gentle Shakespeare allows a gentleman to insult a beaten man. I was therefore outraged by Irving's conception: he was near the door when Gratiano spoke; at once he turned, walked back to Gratiano, drew himself up, crossing his arms, and scanned him contemptuously from head to foot amid the wild applause of the whole house. When Irving challenged me to explain, I said it seemed to me that if Shylock had treated Gratiano in this way, Gratiano would probably have spat in his face and kicked him off the stage.