CHAPTER VII.

THE performances in Paris were originally announced to begin on November the 18th, 1844, hut, owing to Mr Macready's absence, they were postponed to the end of the month, by which time he was expected to arrive from America. Miss Faucit, accompanied by a lady friend, arrived in Paris on the 26th. Four hours of a stormy crossing from Folkestone, and twenty-four hours in a diligence, in weather of unusual severity, developed a cold in her always delicate chest, which lasted throughout her stay in Paris. Owing to some personal accident Mr Macready did not arrive there till late in December. "He called upon me," Miss Faucit wrote to me, "the day after his arrival, made all sorts of inquiries, and expressed much pleasure at the reports he had heard of me when I was in Scotland. He said, Mr Mitchell had made a great mistake in engaging us together, that we should have played in separate engagements. He is very gentle and subdued, and at present exceedingly amiable to all." At no time was Mr Macready tolerant of a rival attraction, and what he had, no doubt, heard of the reputation Miss Faucit had made for herself in Scotland was well calculated to make him uneasy. This uneasiness must have been greatly increased, as night after night Miss Faucit roused the enthusiasm of the French audience; and his "gentleness and amiability" seem to have been soon succeeded by "a desire to keep everything and everybody else down, and to submerge all things into that important centre, Self." Regarding Mr Macready, as Miss Faucit did, with high and almost affectionate esteem, he must have completely lost control of his overbearing temper in the course of this engagement, to make her write thus at its close: "Either Mr Macready has grown more

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FIRST APPEARANCE IN PARIS.

[1845.

selfish and exacting, or I am less capable of bearing with such ungenerous conduct. In either case I am far better away from him."

It could not have been pleasant to him to find, that, speaking of Othello, the first play in which they appeared together, the most authoritative of French critics, M. Edouard Thierry, should say in the Messager, "Before the close of the evening, the public divided its attention between Othello and Desdemona. It had become aware, that London had sent it something more than a great tragedian, and that it had also sent a great tragédienne." Miss Faucit's appearance had been heralded by no newspaper paragraphs, by none of the highly coloured panegyrics, by which the French were accustomed to have their attention called to actresses of any distinction. But as M. Thierry writes, "True talent has no need of these editorial and managerial prelusions; unknown before the performance, Miss Faucit was so no longer from the fourth act onward. After the fifth, she was recalled with Macready. She had become as one of our own actresses-a truly French actress." He finds in her a voice like that of Madame Mars. Higher praise in that direction no Frenchman could give. Her singular grace of movement reminds him of Fanny Ellsler, and, when she speaks, "the voice," he says, "is specially in accord with this grace, the sweetness of the organ fits in well with this harmony of demeanour and of the whole person." He is struck by the contrast of her declamation to that of Macready. His he finds to be over-elaborate and over-accentuated, in what he calls the English manner, by the stress laid upon every syllable, while Miss Faucit speaks simply, naturally, the sentences flowing from her lips fluently and without a break. The Parisian press generally wrote of her in the same strain. The charm of her movements was so great, that the audience wanted to see her, even when she had not to speak. Thus, a writer in Blackwood 1 says she remembers "Jules Janin's indignation at Macready's standing before her during the appeal made by Desdemona to the Senate, so that with his ample robe he completely hid the beautiful kneeling figure behind him. I remember, that Jules Janin

1 Quoted in a paper on "Helen Faucit" in Blackwood's Magazine for December 1885, by Miss Margaret Stokes.

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GREAT IMPRESSION PRODUCED.

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called him, in his review of the performance in the Débats, 'Ce grand paravent de Macready!' I also remember," the same writer adds, "her dresses as Desdemona were highly praised, and declared to be the correct historical costume."

Here is her own modest account of the evening in a letter to me (December 22, 1844): "On Monday I was too ill to attend rehearsal, and many doubts my doctor had, if I could act at night. Still, Desdemona is so easy, that I managed very well, and my share of the play went off very successfully, they tell me. I am sick with hearing of costumes and coiffures. The people here seem to think and dream of nothing else. I am surprising everybody with my comparative indifference to these matters. hear I satisfied them on Monday night in this respect-nay, indeed, that men and women agreed that (to use their own expression) I looked like an angel."

The next play produced was Hamlet. In the letter just. quoted she writes: "Mr Macready saw me rehearse Ophelia yesterday morning, and expressed great admiration at my original feeling and conception of the part, but, alas! alas! goodness only knows what it will be like to-night. I will not close this till the morning." In the morning she adds: "The mad scenes went off very well, the singing part of them especially.

. . There are some new thoughts in it, that were particularly felt, but which I cannot now describe. If we ever meet and talk it over, I can make you feel with me. It is extraordinary how I felt my strength when left alone. I was ill with fright beforehand, but away it went when I faced the enemy-at least it was overborne by the necessities of the scene."

Writing of this first performance in August, 1880 ("Letter on Ophelia "), Miss Faucit says:

Oh how difficult it is, however much you have lived in a thing, to make real your own ideal, and give it an utterance and form! To add to my fright, I was told, just before entering on the scene, that Grisi and many others of the Italian group were sitting in a private box on the stage. But I believe I sang in tune, and I know I soon forgot Grisi and all else. I could not help feeling that I somehow drew my audience with me. And what an audience it was! No obtrusive, noisy applause; but what an indescribable atmosphere of sympathy surrounded you! Every tone was heard, every look was watched, felt, appreciated. I seemed lifted into "an ampler ether,

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HER OPHELIA.

[1845.

a diviner air." . . . I learned afterwards that, among the audience were many of the finest minds in Paris; and some of them found "most pretty things' to say of the Ophelia to which I had introduced them. Many came after the play to my dressing-room, in the French fashion, among them Georges Sand -to say them, I suppose; but, having had this ordeal to go through before, after acting Desdemona, my English shyness took me out of the theatre as soon as I had finished. All this was, of course, pleasant. But what really gratified me most was, to learn that Mr Macready, sternest of critics, watched me on each night in the scenes of the fourth act; and among the kind things he said, I cannot forget his telling me that I had thrown a new light on the part, and that he had never seen the mad scenes even approached before.

The correspondent of the Illustrated London News (December 28, 1844) writes:

Miss Faucit's Ophelia is a remarkable performance. She cannot, of course, sing the music with the finish of a prima donna-Shakespeare never intended that it should be so sung. The snatches of tunes are the components of tragic and of lyric passion, and so Miss Faucit used rather than executed them. But her voice is sweet and plaintive, and fully serves her to do what she requires. For the acting, nothing more true or tender has been given on the stage since the highest triumphs of Miss O'Neill-accordingly, though many heartily applauded, more as heartily wept. A critic in the Charivari gives us the best account of her powers in saying that it would be impossible to produce effect with less effort; and this is, beyond all doubt, the perfection of art.

The writer in Blackwood already quoted says:—

The last time I ever saw Alexandre Dumas we talked of Miss Faucit, and the tears stood in his eyes as he recalled her Ophelia, and her farewell to the company in the mad scene: Ah, madame, cette sortie! cette sortie! jamais je ne l'oublierai de ma vie." He was not gifted with perseverance, and yet he went to every performance, and could recount the emotions of every scene in which Miss Faucit appeared. "Elle me fait rever-elle m'inspire toujours des créations nouvelles!" was the reason he gave to his friends, who wondered at what they called the bonhomie with which he would spend whole evenings in listening to what he could not understand. . . . Dumas did not understand a word of English; but he asserted that he could follow the artist through every phase of emotion by her wonderfully expressive play of feature alone.1

1 Dumas was so deeply impressed by the genius of Miss Faucit that he was extremely anxious to write a play for her. "The subject was to be the intrigue to prevent the marriage of the Duke of Orleans with the daughter of Charles I.-Henriette d'Angleterre - a rôle admirably fitted for Miss Faucit. Dumas, in his enthusiasm, once exclaimed in my hearing, "There

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PARISIAN CRITICISMS.

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This reminds one of what was said of Barton Booth, "The blind could see, and the deaf hear him"; and of Garrick, that "his face was a language."

The critic of the Révue Britannique writes :

Quelle tragédienne simple et vraie que Miss Helen Faucit! Quelle tendresse à la fois passionée et pure! Que d'abandon et de pudeur ! Comme elle vous fait aimer et plaindre la naïve innocence de Desdemona ! Comme elle vous révèle tout ce qu'il y a de poésie dans la démence d'Ophélia ! Dans ce dernier rôle, la pantomime, l'expressions du visage et les intonations de la voix en disent plus que les vers et la prose de Shakespeare! Aussi les spectateurs les plus étrangers à la langue Anglaise ont pu y apprécier une tragédienne qui était tout-à-fait inconnue en France. Sans blesser l'amour propre d'aucune actrice de Paris, il est permis de leur dire a toutes: Allez voir et étudier la folie d'Ophélia.

In speaking of the Ophelia, M. Edouard Thierry notes that avoidance of anything like personal prominence, that quality of the subordination of self to the development of the scene, which was always paramount with Miss Faucit:

On n'avait imaginé Ophélia ni plus touchante, ni plus gracieuse. Notre parterre Français est demeuré surpris devant cette pantomime pleine de sens, pleine d'idées, pleine de bonté, pleine de tendreses, pleine de passion même, mais surtout pleine de mesure et pleine de modestie. Car c'est là une qualité rare; aussi je reviens sur cet éloge; il y a dans Miss Faucit, et à un degré éminent, ce que j'appelle la modestie de l'artiste, ce désintéressement précieux par lequel l'artiste préfère l'art à lui-même, et le succès du drame à son propre succès. Quel que soit le rôle, quelle que soit la scène, Miss Faucit prend sa place dans la perspective du tableau, dans l'ensemble de l'œuvre, et cette place elle la garde jusqu'à la fin, sans chercher à sortir de la demi-teinte nécessaire; disparaissant même au besoin dans l'ombre que le poète a ménagée.

This characteristic must have been especially conspicuous in Miss Faucit's Virginia in the Virginius of Sheridan Knowles, which was the next character performed by her in Paris. "It is one of those parts," writes M. Thierry, "which none of our artists would willingly accept. Written, it contains scarcely sixty lines. Acted, it assists the duration of the first four acts, to disappear

is not an actress on the French stage-no, nor yet among the great ladies of the Court-whose voice, look, and gesture could represent the royal princess so well as Helen Faucit. Her very tread is that of royalty."—(Writer in Blackwood already cited.)