1839.]

QUEEN AT THEATRE.

63

most likely one of gratitude for what she had shown him of beautiful womanhood in his visits to the theatre.

Miss Faucit, we have seen, was looking forward with pleasure to performing Pauline before the Queen on the 1st of February. But, as she herself wrote years afterwards, "like many pleasures long looked forward to, the whole of this evening was a disappointment. The side-scenes were crowded with visitors, Mr Macready having invited many friends. They were terribly in the way of the exits and entrances. Worse than all, those who knew you insisted on saluting you; those who did not made you run the gauntlet of a host of curious eyes-and this in a place where, most properly, no strangers had hitherto been allowed to intrude." In her Journal the next day she makes the same complaint: "The Queen's box," she adds, "looked very beautiful. How calm and self-possessed she seems! It is wonderful in one so young. I almost pity her when I think of the high responsibility her lofty station brings with it, and she almost a child. She must be a little more than mortal if she fills it as she ought. Acted very ill-my throat so sore, it was painful for me to speak at all. Oh, how glad I was to turn my back upon the bustle and excitement of the night! When you are feeling very ill, to see nothing but gaiety and show about you appears to aggravate your own suffering. I have taken a dreadful cold, and it is making me heavy and utterly stupid. I have to act Miranda tonight. Oh for to-morrow's [Sunday's] sweet calm and rest!"

Ill as she was, and racked by a torturing cough of which her Journal tells, she had for the next fortnight no intermission of her duties at the theatre, performing every night, and rehearsing Bulwer's Richelieu almost every morning. After a blank of many days in her Journal, she writes (25th March): "A long long gap in your Journal, Miss Helen. I have no notion now of what I have been doing, save and except that my time has been so occupied one way or another, that I have not had any to throw away in recording what about. I have been to some seventeen or eighteen rehearsals of Richelieu, and, when spared from these, giving a great many sittings to Miss Drummond, and also to Miss Gillies and Mr Lane. The new play, Richelieu, came out, I think, on the 7th of this month, and has been most

64

JULIE DE MORTEMAR.

[1839.

successful and attractive. My poor Julie, I don't like you a bit, or at any rate but a very little bit better than I did. I suppose, nevertheless, you must be put up with for some time to come. This it had to be-down, in fact, to the close of Mr Macready's management at Covent Garden. The part is in itself so trivial that Miss Faucit might have exercised her right to refuse to play it, but for her wish to show to Mr Macready, by her compliance with his request, that she was ready to assist in what she regarded as his heroic determination to illustrate every play which he produced with the best resources at his command. She made more of the part than any one else has ever done, and in a long letter to her on the morning after the first performance, Bulwer writes to "express his great gratification at the spirit, grace, and delicacy with which you so charmingly animated the part of Julie."

The only fresh part which Miss Faucit was called upon to play during this season was Rosalind. As this was one of the characters with which in succeeding years her name was specially identified, her own account of her first performance, in the "Letter to Mr Browning on Rosalind," had best be referred to.

I need not tell you [she writes] that when you first saw my Rosalind, I was too young at that time to value her, and could not enter so fully into her rich complex nature as to do justice to it. This was no more possible than it would have been for Shakespeare to have written, before the maturity of manhood, a play so full of gentle wisdom, so catholic in its humanity, so subtle in the delineation, so abounding in nicely balanced contrasts of character, so full of happy heart, so sweetly rounded into a harmonious close, as As You Like It. His mind had assuredly worked its way through the conflicts and perplexities of life, within as well as without, and had settled into harmony with itself, before this play was written.

In my first girlhood's studies of Shakespeare this play had no share. Pathos, heroism, trial, suffering-in these my imagination revelled, and my favourites were the heroines who were put most sorely to the proof. Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, I had brooded over until they had become, as it were, part of my life; and, as you will remember, in the more modern plays, in which I performed the prominent parts, the pathetic or tragic element almost invariably predominated. When, therefore, I was told by Mr Macready that I was to act Rosalind for my benefit at the end of a season, I was terrified. I did not know the words, nor had I ever seen the play performed, but I heard enough of what Mrs Jordan and others had done with the character, to add fresh alarm to my misgivings. Mr Mac

1839.]

FIRST APPEARANCE AS ROSALIND.

65

ready, however, was not to be gainsaid; so I took up my Shakespeare, determined to make the best of what had then to me all the aspect of a somewhat irksome task. Of course I had not time to give to the entire play the study it requires, if Rosalind is to be rightly understood.

The night of trial came. Partly because the audience were indulgent to me in everything I did, partly, I suppose, because it was my benefit night, the performance was received with enthusiasm. I went home happy, and thinking how much less difficult my task had been than I had imagined. But there a rude awakening awaited me. I was told that I had been merely playing, not acting, not impersonating a great character. I had not, it seemed to my friends, made out what were traditionally known as the great points in the character. True, I had gained the applause of the audience, but this was to be deemed as nothing. Taken in the mass, they were as ignorant as I was, perhaps more so, as probably, even in my hasty study, I had become better acquainted with the play than most of them. It was very necessary, I have no doubt, and wholesome for me, to receive this lesson. But oh, what a pained and wounded heart I took with me that night to my pillow! I had thought that, upon the whole, I had not been so very bad,— that I had been true at least to Shakespeare in my general conception, though, even as I acted, I felt I had not grasped anything like the full significance of the words I was uttering. Glimpses of the poet's purpose I had, no doubt, for I do not think I ever altered the main outlines of my first conception; but of the infinite development of which it is capable I had no idea. It was only when I came to study the character minutely, and to act it frequently, that its depths were revealed to me.

It was well that in this case, as in that of all the other characters in Shakespeare which Miss Faucit was called on to impersonate, she had never seen them acted, and was hampered by none of the stage conventions. The importance of this will be understood by those who are conversant with the history of the English stage, and who know the air of hoydenish audacity heretofore given to the character of Rosalind, aggravated by the introduction into the mouth of the heroine of the Cuckoo song from Love's Labour's Lost, which even in Shakespeare's day would have been regarded as unseemly in a woman's mouth.

The "traditional points" which her friends at home missed in Miss Faucit's acting were, no doubt, the very things of which she found no suggestions in the Rosalind whom Shakespeare drew. What Rosalind really was, as he had seen her in his mood of inspiration, Miss Faucit's sympathetic genius dis

E

66

FIRST APPEARANCE AS ROSALIND,

[1839.

covered, as she pored over "the leaves of his unvalued book," and this ideal she clothed with a life that gladdened the hearts of thousands down to the close of her theatrical career. Imperfect as her first development of the character may have been, it could not have been without charm, for within the short period that remained of the season Mr Macready selected it for performance again and again.

CHAPTER IV.

THE season closed on the 9th of July 1839. It had been brilliant in what had been done by Mr Macready in the illustration of Shakespeare and other dramatists, not only by means of his powerful company, but also by the admirable framework in which the business of the scene was set, yet it had yielded him a very inadequate financial return for his exhausting labours. He therefore declined to renew his lease, and entered into a lengthened engagement to appear at the Haymarket Theatre. He was by this time well aware that without Miss Faucit's assistance he could not produce with effect the plays with which she had been associated with him at Covent Garden. Of this Mr Webster, the manager, was no less strongly convinced. Accordingly she was engaged by him for the season on the same high terms as she had received at Covent Garden. On the 19th of July, only ten days after the closing of that theatre, she appeared at the Haymarket as Desdemona to Mr Macready's Othello. Her growing popularity brought with it a serious penalty, in the incessant strain of having to act fatiguing parts such as this, Mrs Haller, Mrs Oakley, and Pauline, five nights in every week. Pauline was most frequently called for, and the more it came to be known, the greater was the enthusiasm it excited. Innumerable tributes of admiration poured in upon Miss Faucit, and it was generally acknowledged that but for her the play would never have taken the hold of the public which it did.

To Miss Faucit it was a delight to be for the time called away from Bulwer's heroine to Shakespeare's Portia. On the 4th of October The Merchant of Venice was produced, Mr Macready's