SIGNOR SALYINI IN TWO PLAYS.
AN English actor of high rank in his profession recently spoke of Signor Salvini as the greatest living exponent of
dramatic art. Being asked whether he passed this deliberate judg- ment upon the Italian tragedian as he was when, nine years ago, London saw him for the first time, or as he is now, the English actor answered that it applied both then and now,—that the amazing personality of the man and the force of his genius defied time. Thinking much of this pronouncement, and re- taining a vivid and exact remembrance of Signor Salvini's acting in Hamlet and Ii Gladiator° in 1875, the pre- sent writer resolved to see him in two plays, one (Othello) Shakespearian, the other (La Morte elate) modern Italian, each typical, and both among his most renowned achievements.
It is necessary to say that the translation, or rather, adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello is at the same time a mutilation, and that several fine and familiar passages are not to be recognised in the Italian version. But the delivery by Signor Salvini of the unmutilated passages is such as to satisfy the imagination, while it entirely surpasses the experience of the most devoted lovers of Shakespeare. His conception of the character of Othello is magnificent in its grasp and completeness. If the revelation of the savage underlying the veneer laid on by military glory, and "the pomp and circumstance" of Othello's position ; the rapid disintegration of his character under the cruel solvent of his patent weakness, jealousy ; the instant instinct of mur- der; the ferocious resort to basest insult in that almost intolerable scene where he tosses his purse to Emilia ; the brutality which succeeds to his rapturous adulation of Desdemona, and exhibits itself without any restraint of decency before the high official of the Signory,—if these things be not Shakespeare's intention, then what is the meaning of Ludovico's amazed question,—" Is this the noble Moor ?" That the great soldier was a savage, too, is not gainsaid by the fact that Shakespeare has put into his month some of the noblest love-poetry that has ever found words. Has he not made the mean fellow who stole his master's ducats as well as his daughter, utter lines so glorious that they seem to open heaven to our earth- vested eyes and ears ? Is not his masterful, audacious incon- sistency one of the notes of his unapproached genius? Surely; '—and it is the magnificent rendering of this very inconsistency that makes Signor Salvini's Othello the matchless performance that it is. The play of passion, the revelation of the fierce soul, with all its capacity of suffering drawn out by misplaced love for a woman of the higher race, whose moral attitude he cannot comprehend, and whom he therefore dares readily to suspect; the positively silly credulity—a skilfully caught characteristic of his own race—the foolish invention by which he accounts to Desde- mona for the value he sets upon the fatal handkerchief ; the seething hell of hate jealousy and revenge, in whose flames the trappings are all burned off, and the savage nature stands forth naked ; the stealthy deliberateness of the murder ; the terrible abjectness of the subsequent despair,—all these awful gradations of moral ruin and agony are marked with colossal power by this man of genius.
To his performance of Othello, accessories are unim- portant, details do not matter, even words are indifferent, save for the absorbing charm of the voice that takes each tone of the passions at work in the man's breast, as from sun and clouds a landscape takes shine and shadow. It does not matter that the stage appointments lack all the lavishness and elaboration which we have become used to see in our London theatres. Who cares about the stage or its management, when Othello is telling his story to the Signory, in a voice whose first note is like a silver sound struck from a bell cast in the canning foundries of Flanders or Florence, or uttering that immortal greeting to his wife at Cyprus, with its underlying presage of woe and sense of finality finding an echo in every human heart, in tones so pure, so noble, and so sweet, that it is an utter marvel how it can ever have been said that in this scene the actor portrays only passion of the baser sort? Or again, when the wretched dupe and murderer, faint and feeble, crushed and weeping, with the awful sobs of a strong man's agony, over the irrevocable deed, describes himself, uttering the words, "Un uom che saggio amar non seppe, ma troppo am; un nom che non facil tanto a gelosia," with simple pathos that is almost unendurable, and the next moment commands, "E dit,e che in Aleppo," &c., in the grand, old tone, as when he was wont to set his ever-victorious squadrons in the field. Who cares about the ugliness of the costumes, the inadequateness of the other actors, while this one is revealing the tragedy of a tortured soul with sublime power that would force us to feel it if we could not follow a word of the language, and to learn it from his features and his move- ments if we were all stone-deaf ? That Signor Salvini is not well supported has been generally admitted and deplored, bat this is much less of a drawback in his case than in that of any other "star." An ordinary stock com- pany who acted no more badly than the ladies and gen- tlemen now acting at Covent Garden would be held to do well enough ; but then, they would not be condemned to " sup- port" a colossus by whose side they and their betters are dwarfs. There is no occasion for either blame or praise ; the capacity even of Iago is a matter of no consequence. We should, indeed, like to see such an Iago as Mr. Herman Vezin distilling his poison into the soul of the only Othello worthy of that scholarly and accomplished actor ; but still we feel that the Iago before our eyes does well enough, for he need not be in our mind at all.
The points to dwell upon, outside the contemplation of the grandeur of the whole performance, are too numerous to be indicated here. The key-note is struck, after the splendid delivery of the speech to the Signory, by the sudden, fierce gleam of Othello's eyes, and the unconscious clutch of the dagger at his brep.st, when Brabantio, whom he has been treating with exquisite gentleness, gives him the ironical warning, " She has deceived her father, and may thee." The subtle variations of expression, of gesture, and of tone ; the calm authority, the quick, soldierly bearing towards all but Desdemona, the impassioned, lover-like way in which the Moor throws off the cares of his command for his brief hour with her, the emphasis of the last happy moments that they are to know, and then the awakening of the savage nature, with all its fierceness and cruelty ; the stormy strife, in which the tormented man rends his own heart and makes his own shipwreck ; the reawakening of love amid the grossest in- sult and most heinous injury ; the suggestion of murder in the glide, the spring, the hissed command, the blow ; the sudden repression of passion ; the dreadful irony of the fiendish smile that replaces the former look of infinite sweetness ; the gleam of the eyeball, the quiver of the under-jaw ; the muttering, the deadly ferocity of the attack on Iago, and the superhuman
anguish of the dupe when undeceived by Emilia, are but a few of the points which one recalls afterwards, and can never forget. In the last scene the effect produced by the actor's dropping into a -chair by the table on which lies the dagger that he would not use to mar the beauty he still worshipped and abhorred, and speaking those famous final lines while seated, is extraordinary. The quiet misery of his reply to Cassio, "I am not the Othello you once knew !" the dignity of his "Or, di quest° non
piii "- he is done with even the memory of his service rendered to the State—the way in which the unaccustomed sense that he is unarmed and helpless is conveyed, changing in a moment to that of freedom and a way of escape, as his furtive eye drops upon the dagger, and his stealthy hand softly closes upon it, while the mellifluous voice pours out its parting message, is not to be described ; but it strikes the observer with wonder at its power and sublety. ' The weapon in his grasp, he is a free man— they might close in and take him only a moment before—he rises to his height, his voice rings out, his last ruse is a triumph, his death-blow is a victory.
In La Mork Civile we have a drama of the purely Italian kind, with which the taste of English audiences has nothing in -common. It is, like all Giacometti's plays, and those of most Italian dramatists, single-motived, monotonous, without under- plot or finesse of any kind, and provided with dialogue largely in excess of incident. One grand situation, made by the drama- tist for the actor to get out of, with the aid of a great deal of talk, is the Italian notion of an acceptable drama. It is not ours ; but then, we have no Salvini. As easily as Gulliver in Lilliput took up the fleet of cockboats under his arm and walked -off with it, does the great Italian dispose of the petty objections to the sombre and, in truth, sordid story which he has to inter- pret. He has been accused of over-abjectness and self-abase- ment in the role of Conrade, the escaped convict, under life sentence, who, breaking his prison (how, is told by the marvel- lous eloquence of the actor's hands, used as no English actor could use his hands, with an effect that is a revela- tton of an 'extra power), comes to seek his wife and child, and finds himself regarded as an outlaw, one civilly dead; his wife's one desire being to conceal his existence from their child, and to prevent his knowing that the girl whom a charitable friend has adopted is that child. He has been blamed for wearing, in the character of an escaped convict, a tlop suit of shabby brown velveteen, and using a red cotton handkerchief. What should he wear ? What should his atti- tude be, in the most forlorn of plights, and under the most hopeless and heart-breaking of conditions P Granted that the play is dull, that nobody cares about the philanthropic doctor who has befriended the convict's hard-hearted wife and silly daughter; that the intriguing priest is in bad taste, and the solitary situation is prolonged past patience, according to the laws of dramatic criticism,—what does all this matter, while we are looking at Signor Salvini portraying a man racked to death by the outrage of the best and purest affections of the human heart, which have remained untainted by his guilt, and un- 'benumbed by his long years of punishment and expiation ? Granted that the play is cruel rather than tragic, what matter, when the player lifts its cruelty into tragedy, and by a few fine touches, given with the broad and masterly simpli- city we remember so well in Ii Gladiators, puts before us the imprisoned soul writhing in the imprisoned body under the fierce torture of jealousy. The wife, indirectly for whose 'cake he has committed the crime, is free, and in poverty ! What is she doing, she, whose brother he has slain, while he "lies howling" in this hell? And the child—the baby, whom we see, by the light of the actor's genius, as plainly as if his empty arms held it, and his yearning eyes perused its features before our faces ; the lost home, the lusty life,— " The free, blue streams and the sunny sky,
The fair world shut from the captive's eye ;"
we, in a hot, glaring theatre, amid a many-minded crowd, see them all, in the face of the forlorn creature pleading his miserable cause to those whose hearts remain closed to him. If it be true that to awaken the emotion of " pity " is one of the legitimate functions of the drama, La Marts Civile certainly fulfils that function, by the antithetical means of pitilessness. Its gloom is unrelieved; but that is of the essence of one-motived dramas of the modern Italian school; we know this beforehand. But the actor (again, be is the one actor ; he fills the whole scene ; nothing else matters) never fails to hold attention captive, to wring pangs of compassion from his audience, to fascinate them by the face, whose lines and features express in life the agony that the group of the Laocoon ex- presses in marble, from the moment when he begins to wither and die under the pitiless calculation of his wife, the uninten- tional cruelty of his child, and the merciless reasoning of the doctor,—on, on, through the succession of stabs and shocks that go to the breaking of his heart, to the awful realism of that slow dissolution, when it is at last quite broken, and the prisoner, mocked awhile with the vain phantom of liberty, gets the real order of release at last. Then the waxen features, strangely ennobled, settle down from the smile turned upon the unconscious daughter, which is the most beautiful and. awful look we have ever seen upon a player's face, into the apathy of death. That no actor except Signor Salvini could render La Morte Civile acceptable to English taste, we entertain no doubt ; that he made it absorbingly interesting to a large and critical audience, the present writer can bear witness. The nine years that have elapsed since be first came among us seemed to be impossible, in the presence of hie great genius. Age has not withered it, nor has custom staled its infinite variety.
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