Travels in France during the years 1814-1815, Patrick Fraser Tytler [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

The great difference, then, between the acting of Talma, and of the other actors on the French stage, is his constant attention to the means by which the impression, which the general tendency of the play will produce, may be increased. Whatever may be the character which the nature of the tragedy seems to require, his whole powers are employed to pursue that character inviolably during the progress of the play, and to add to the effect it is fitted to produce: The character of profound grief, for instance, is so completely sustained, that the very act of speaking seems an exertion too great for a mind which suffering has nearly exhausted, and where, in consequence, the pomp and energy of declamation, and many of the most natural aids by which passion is wont to express itself, are all disregarded in the intensity of mental agony. It is not uncommon, accordingly, to see Talma perform parts of a tragedy in a manner which might seem tame and unmeaning to one who had not been present at the preceding parts, but which is most interesting to those who have seen the character which he adopts from the first, and feel the propriety and effect of the manner in which that character is sustained. Some of the most striking effects we have ever seen produced in any acting, are in those scenes, in many plays in which he performs, in which, from his powerful and affecting personation of character, his exhausted mind seems unable to enter into any events which are not either to relieve his sufferings, or terminate an existence which appears beset with such hopeless misery. Other actors may have succeeded in expressing as strongly the influence of present suffering, or the despair of intense grief. It is Talma alone who knows how to express, what is so much more grand, the effects of long suffering; to remind you of the misery he has endured by the spectacle of an exhausted frame and broken spirit; and by exhibiting the overwhelming consequence of those sufferings which the poet has not dared to describe, nor the actor ventured to represent to interest the mind far more profoundly than any representation of present passion could possibly effect. The influence of the exertions of other actors is limited to the effects of the emotions they represent, and of the suffering they exhibit: the genius of Talma has imitated the efforts of ancient Greece in her matchless sculpture, and, in every situation which put it within his power, chosen, as the proper field for the display of the actor's powers, not the mere representation of excess in suffering, but that moment of greater interest, when the struggle of nature is past, and the mind has sunk under the pressure of affliction, which no fortitude could sustain, and which no ray of hope had cheered.

Every one knows the peculiar manner in which, in general, the verses of the French tragedy are repeated, and the delight which the French people take in the uniform and balanced modulation of voice with which they are accompanied. In an ordinary actor, this peculiar tone is often, to many foreigners, extremely fatiguing, but it is defended in France, as securing a pleasure in some degree independent of the merits of the actor, and defending the audience from the harshness of tone, and extravagancies of accent, to which otherwise, in bad actors, they would be exposed; and certainly no one can listen, in the National Theatre, to the beautiful and splendid declamations of the most celebrated compositions in French literature, delivered in the manner which has been selected as best adapted to the character of the plays and the taste of the people, with any feeling of indifference. In the skilful hands of Talma, who preserves the beauty of the poetry nearly unimpaired in the very abandon of feeling, the French verse acquires beauties which it never before could boast, and loses all that is harsh or painful in the uniformity of its structure, or the monotony of artificial taste. The description which Le Baron de Grimm has given of Le Kain may be well applied to Talma. "Un talent plus precieux sans doute et qu'il avait porté au plus haut degré c'etait celui de faire sentir tout le charme des beaux vers sans nuire jamais a la verité de l'expression. En dechirant le cœur, il enchantait toujours l'oreille, sa voix pénétrait jusqu'au fond de l'ame, et l'impression qu'elle y faisait, semblable a celle du burin, y laissait des traces et longs souvenirs."

The tragedy of Hamlet, in which we saw Talma perform for the first time, is one which must be interesting to every person who has any acquaintance with French literature; and it will not probably be considered as any great digression in a description of Talma's excellencies as an actor, to add some further remarks concerning that celebrated play in which his powers are perhaps most strikingly displayed, and which is one of the greatest compositions undoubtedly of the French theatre. It can hardly be called a translation, as many material alterations were made in the story of the play; and though the general purport of the principal speeches has been sometimes preserved, the language and sentiments are generally extremely different. The character of Shakespeare's Hamlet was wholly unsuited to the taste of a French audience. What is the great attraction in that mysterious being to the feelings of the English people, the strange, wild, and metaphysical ideas which his art or his madness seems to take such pleasure in starting, and the uncertainty in which Shakespeare has left the reader with regard to Hamlet's real situation, would not perhaps have been understood—certainly not admired, by those who were accustomed to consider the works of Racine and Voltaire as the models of dramatic composition. In the play of Ducis, accordingly, Hamlet thinks, talks, and acts pretty much as any other human being would do, who should be compelled to speak only in the verse of the French tragedy, which necessarily excludes, in a great degree, any great incoherence or flightiness of sentiment. In some respects, however, the French Hamlet, if a less poetical personage, is nevertheless a more interesting one, and better adapted to excite those feelings which are most within the command of the actor's genius. M. Ducis has represented him as more doubtful of the reality of the vision which haunted him, or at least of the authority which had commissioned it for such dreadful communications; and this alteration, so important in the hands of Talma, was required on account of other changes which had been made in the story of the play. The paramour of the Queen is not Hamlet's uncle, nor had the Queen either married the murderer, or discovered her criminal connexion with him. Hamlet, therefore, has not, in the incestuous marriage of his mother, that strong confirmation of the ghost's communication, which, in Shakespeare, led him to suspect foul play even before he sees his father's spirit. In the French play, therefore, Hamlet is placed in one of the most dreadful situations in which the genius of poetry can imagine a human being: Haunted by a spirit, which assumes such mastery over his mind, that he cannot dispel the fearful impression it has made, or disregard the communication it so often repeats, while his attachment to his mother, in whom he reveres the parent he has lost, makes him question the truth of crimes which are thus laid to her charge, and causes him to look upon this terrific spectre as the punishment of unknown crime, and the visitation of an offended Deity. Ducis has most judiciously and most poetically represented Hamlet, in the despair which his sufferings produce, as driven to the belief of an over-ruling destiny, disposing of the fate of its unhappy victims by the most arbitrary and revolting arrangement, and visiting upon some, with vindictive fury, the whole crimes of the age in which they live. There is in this introduction of ancient superstition, something which throws a mysterious veil round the destiny of Hamlet, that irresistibly engrosses the imagination, and which must be doubly interesting in that country where the horrors of the revolution have ended in producing a very prevalent, though vague belief, in the influence of fatality upon human character and human actions, among those who pretend to ridicule, as unmanly prejudice and childish delusion, the religion of modern Europe.

The struggle, accordingly, that appears to take place in Hamlet's mind is most striking; and when at last he yields to the authority and the commands of the spirit, which exercises such tyranny over his mind, it does not seem the result of any farther evidence of the guilt which he is enjoined to revenge, but as the triumph of superstition over the strength of his reason. He had long resisted the influence of that visionary being, which announced itself as his father's injured spirit, and in assuming that sacred form, had urged him to destroy the only parent whom fate had left; but the struggle had brought him to the brink of the grave, and shaken the empire of reason; and when at last he abandons himself to the guidance of a power which his firmer nature had long resisted, the impression of the spectator is, that his mind has yielded in the struggle, and that, in the desperate hope of obtaining relief from present wretchedness, he is about to commit the most horrible crimes, by obeying the suggestions of a spirit, which he more than suspects to be employed only to tempt him on to perdition. No description can possibly do justice to the manner in which this situation of Hamlet is represented by Talma; indeed, on reading over the play some time afterwards, it was very evident that the powers of the actor had invested the character with much of the grandeur and terror which seemed to belong to it, and that the imagination of the French poet, which rises into excellence, even when compared with the productions of that great master of the passions whom he has not submitted to copy, has been surpassed by the fancy of the actor for whom he wrote. The Hamlet of Talma is probably productive of more profound emotion, than any representation of character on any stage ever excited.

One other alteration ought to be mentioned, as it renders the circumstances of Hamlet's situation still more distressing, and affords Talma an opportunity of displaying the effects of one of the gentler passions of human nature, when its influence seemed irreconcileable with the stern and fearful duties which fate had assigned to him. The Ophelia of the French play, so unlike that beautiful and innocent being who alone seems to connect the Hamlet of Shakespeare with the feelings and nature of ordinary men, has been made the daughter of the man for whose sake the king has been poisoned, and was engaged to marry Hamlet at that happier period when he was the ornament of his father's court, and the hope of his father's subjects. In the first part of the play, though no hint of the terrible revenge which he was to execute on her father has escaped, the looks and anxiety of Talma discover to her that her fate is in some degree connected with the emotions which so visibly oppress him, and she makes him at last confess the insurmountable barrier which separates them for ever. Nothing can be greater than the acting of Talma during this difficult scene, in which he has to resist the entreaties of the woman whom he loves, when imploring for the life of her father, and yet so overcome with his affection, as hardly to have strength left to adhere to his dreadful purpose.

The feelings of a French audience do not permit the spirit of Hamlet's father to