Mrs. Pritchard, the annals of the stage tell us, made her terrible. Her composure was marble-like, and in contrast to Garrick's superagitated manner in 'Macbeth' produced a profound impression of terror. She must indeed have embodied the fateful ideal of the character with much completeness and to the exclusion of other phases. This ideal is doubtless the popular one, and with it doubtless the notion of a physical counterpart after the manner of Maclise's famous painting of the banquet scene, in which the Lady Macbeth is a Gaelic giantess whose little finger suggests a thickness greater than a man's loins; a woman of brawn and muscle to scuttle a ship or cut a throat. Thus ever the vulgar ideal; thus never the vulgar fact. The vivid passion to do and dare never wastes its strength on bulk, nor hangs out signs and banners in countenance or carriage, that all may know its habitation. It is the delicate frame instinct with nerve-force that embodies spirits like these, as Shakespeare with his consummate art indicated by having Lady Macbeth speak of her "little hand." Mrs. Siddons, who has largely fixed the stage tradition, made Lady Macbeth both fascinating and terrible, or rather she thought her both; she made her chiefly terrible, always imperious, her raven hair and piercing eyes, her queenly form and stately mien, lending themselves with vast effect to the purpose. In the sleepwalking scene, for example, her manner was wide-awake, her movements alert. She stepped quickly, poured imperceptible water from an imaginary ewer, bent her body to listen to imaginary sounds, and hurried to retake the light where she had left it, that she might with all speed drag Macbeth to their chamber. There is no more instructive passage in the literature of the theatre than that in Hazlitt (or is it Dr. Doran's Annals'?) which tells of Mrs. Siddons' first study of the part, alone in her home at night. The terror of the character so overcame her as to sweep aside, not only her sense of its fascination and womanly pathos, but herself; and that she was never able to dominate it, her acting of it as well as her confession testified. She was wont to declare that her embodiment was not consistent with the feminine and fascinating creature whom she believed Lady Macbeth to be. Charlotte Cushman's Lady Macbeth was wholly terrible, with a side-light here and there of human weakness. Macbeth she held to be "the grandfather of all the Bowery ruffians," and she scorned him in kind and mightily. Fanny Kemble made of her Lady Macbeth a fiend, unrelieved. Modjeska's Lady Macbeth was set forth with acuteness and discrimination by the writer in the January number of POET-LORE (1892), who said, to quote briefly, – "The first impression of Modjeska's Lady Macbeth, by its contrast with more usual renderings, is one of almost too much feminine quickness, feminine strength, and feminine weakness mixed, and an over-subtlety of the dependence of her rôle on that of her husband; but whatever may be thought of the elaborate insight and delicacy of her conception of the part, the idea being granted, admiration for the poignant sensibility, the grace, and intelligence of the impersonation must follow." - Whether the femininity of Modjeska's portrayal be too great may be questioned. Like the "value" of some one color in a painting, it may be too great in proportion to the other colors in the picture. Certain it is that this temper of the character is the key to its pathos, though in danger constantly, of course, of opening to the whole a sense of weakness. In the sleep-walking scene Modjeska presents a sheer wreck of womanhood, the depths, not of divine, but devilish despair, - despair in which there is no hope, a picture touching and true to the key to which she sets the character. The gliding step and sleep-drugged, shrinking motions are consonant with the somewhat persuasive rather than peremptory temper in which she reads the part, the temper which Siddons was sensible to, but the converse of that which she portrayed. Though it can hardly be said that Modjeska's conception of the character is its fascination, rather that other attribute of femininity, appeal, — this at least is dominant. It inspires pity, not awe, never terror; pleads rather than constrains. In the great passage beginning, "I have given milk," in which Macbeth is spurred to the act, the force of Modjeska's rendition is the picture of woman's weakness she makes, as if to say, "You being a man should therefore do this, if I a weak woman could do so." And throughout the urgency to "screw his courage to the sticking place," the exhortation never hardens and flashes like a flaming sword barring the way back, but is ever ductile, flowing, entreating, the weakness of the woman and her subjection to the man pleading constantly, and so following. As essentially feminine as this portrayal, but wholly fascinating as this is entreating, is Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth, if the consensus of newspaper criticism may be accepted. She makes her an exquisite, fragile, feminine creature with golden hair; and by this she so affronted that instinct in man which does love to sweep on in a pack full cry after a woman, hounding her to death, that the critics. declared she was simply a Guinevere or some other exquisite being out of Arthurian legend. Yet Lady Macbeth is surely all that Ellen Terry made her. A woman, to excite continually the love of a sensitive, imaginative, selfish, exacting man like Macbeth, has all need of loveliness. But Lady Macbeth has more than this. Though a woman, she was a queen, and she was a Fate; but she was this because she was so much a woman. It is the wholly feminine nature, and it only, that can subordinate all life into a passionate resolve so unreckoning in every consequence that before her the man stands in awe as something more than human; and so man has ever pictured Fate personified the resistless forces not ourselves, moving on life as a woman. In Lady Macbeth this incarnation is supreme. When Macbeth has invoked her to the great purpose of their lives, he has aroused pure fate, unconscious force, that in human conception can stop nothing short of accomplishment. Morris Ross. A PROPHECY OF AMERICA. AND FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DEAR Just one hundred years ago, William Blake, whom Swinburne calls "the one single Englishman of superior and simple poetic genius born before the closing years of the eighteenth century, the one man of that date fit to rank with the old great names," sat in his humble little back room, which served as bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, and work-room,- sat with his face toward the light, and created that wonderful poem in his series of prophecies called 'America.' I happened to notice this fact the other day; and this being the year of what might be called the posthumous celebration of the anniversary of our being discovered, I suppose I caught the anniversary fever, and felt that at any hazard I must remove one grain more from the appalling desert of my ignorance by reading this prophecy at once, not an easy thing to accomplish, as you know, for the complete series of his prophecies exists only in a limited facsimile edition of one hundred copies of Blake's own original engravings. Happily, I found a copy of this edition at the library, a starred book, so precious that the direst necessity of the most gifted genius could not prevail upon the stern powers who guard the legions of books to allow it to be taken out. I myself heard one whom I conclude was one of these same geniuses irately demanding if the three stars on a book he wanted stood for "purgatory, pandemonium, and hell." When I get hold of a book of which only one hundred copies exist, I like metaphorically to roll it about on my tongue as a delicious morsel before swallowing it. I like to ponder over the titlepage, and study the printer's imprint, and get myself generally into the proper frame of mind for the fullest enjoyment of it. But the stars forbade, and I had to content myself with reading it then and there, with an obnoxious poster leering at me, bearing on its horrid front the legend, "No one on pain of death [I think it said] must make any tracing whatever of any drawing or design thereof, with any manner of pencil, tracing paper, or drawing implements whatsoever." As if I had any intention of attempting so sacrilegious an act as to trace the wondrous designs of William Blake, where every the smallest leaf and stem is almost palpitating with life, and seems to possess, one might venture to say, the "subtle thing called spirit." The man who could bravely wear a bonnet rouge in England during the French Revolution should give voice to wise words on the subject of liberty. Wise they are, without a doubt; but like the oracles of old, they need interpreters. He is, I profoundly believe, the only man that ever lived who absolutely invented a mythology. All myths with which we are familiar, like the old story of the foundation of the world that rests upon an egg, which rests upon a turtle's back, which rests upon something else, vanish along with man himself among pre-antediluvian, anthropoid chatterings. No wonder, then, when an absolutely new mythology is presented to ordinary beings, whose minds know no law of knowledge but the addition and subtraction of inherited concepts, they stand appalled and cry out, "This man was mad." From this charge, Gilchrist and Swinburne have nobly defended him; and the last has certainly thrown much light on the tortuous paths of the Prophecies. The principal mythologic being who figures in America' is Orc, a creature whose flesh is fire, who, amidst chaotic turmoil of the elements, rises from the Atlantic and announces to Albion's wrathful and terrified angel in thundering tones the gospel of liberty. The passage is so fine that I copy it for you to read : "The morning comes, the night decays the watchmen leave their stations The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up: The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk and dried, Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing, awaking Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds and bars are burst: Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air Let the enchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open And let his wife and children return from the oppressors scourge: They look behind at every step and believe it is a dream Singing. The Sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning And the fair moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and wolf shall cease." war and carnage Orc seems to be the symbol of eternal progress, to whom are joined all the terrible attributes of rebellion, and disregard of law, which are the ruthless aids in the attainment |