"EUGENE ARAM."
WHEN Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer rebuked his critics by explaining the intentions with which he had written one of the weakest of his earlier novels,—but his own especial favourite among them,—he stated his sense of the dramatic capacities of the story of Eugene Aram's crime with exaggerated fervour. He published a fragment of his unfinished drama founded on this celebrated case, and he acknowledged that as he conceived it the subject was too much for him. The novel dealt with only half the tragic elements of the case ; it exhibited the murderer's mind under the pressure of remorse and the terror of detection, but did not touch the temptation, the motive, the spiritual history of it, except in retrospect ; it was full of rant and affectation, but it was very effective, and it turned a mere common- place robbery and the brutal murder of Daniel Clarke into a myth, under which the real Eugene Aram is completely hidden. A singularly ungrammatical playbill announced that Mr. W. G. Wills had discarded both Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer's novel and Hood's poem, "The Dream of Eugene Aram," in the drama which was produced at the Lyceum Theatre, on last Saturday, and also that he had adhered to the local traditions connected with the life and the crime of Eugene Aram. Remembering how highly Bulwer had rated the learned schoolmaster of Lynn as a subject for drama, it was doubly interesting to watch how Mr. Wills would contrive to keep clear of the novel, and whether he would fulfil the novelist's ideal, while realising, so soon after Lord Lytton's death, what had been an engrossing fancy of his. Mr. Wills has done neither. The chief situation of his piece is substantially the same as that of Bul- wer's novel, and the drama is only an episode. In both the action takes place years after the commission of the crime, detection dogs the criminal to the eve of his wedding-day ; an innocent young girl loves him, and he is the object of her father's blind, and indeed ridiculous, admiration ; more ridiculous in the play on the part of the Rector of linaresborough, who gives his daughter to the schoolmaster, than in the novel, on the part of Rowland Lester, who is captivated as quickly as Madeleine herself by the gloomy recluse, who talks sentimental science by the yard, and keeps loaded pistols and a deaf servant on his premises. Otherwise, the Squire Lester of the story and the Parson Meadows of the play are decidedly alike,—very foolish, fond old men, hospitable, garru- lous, and sentimental. The girl of the play is an ingenue, less interesting than Madeleine Lester, and without the sympathy of tastes and studious habits, which render Madeleine's attachment to the gloomy, remorseful student natural and probable under the unnatural and improbable circumstances. So far Mr. Wills has cer- tainly not discarded the spirit of the novel, and in the conclusion of the piece he as certainly has not adhered to tradition, but has departed froth it more widely than did Bulwer, who used Aram's famous defence (the true origin of the celebrity of the case), and sent Aram to the gallows in the end, with the added guilt of
suicide. Bulwer's hero is, as Aram in the dock declared himself to be, "equal to either fortune ;" not so Mr. Wills's hero, who, though superbly played by Mr. Irving, is an inconsistent person, able to endure remorse for years, but dying of that remorse and of fear when the hour of .detection threatens. Mr. Wills has not followed either the novel or the fact in the retrospective story of the murder, for which he, like Bulwer, has to assign a reason, not the real one, in order to make the audience tolerate the turning an educated man, who has committed the worst of crimes from the basest of motives, into a hero of romance. Bulwer's is the more artistic falsehood. The love-story of the past in the play, though there are fine passages in it, and one expression of despair uttered with such agonisiug effect by Mr. Irving as disarms all criticism at the moment, is far less skilful and convincing than the story of grinding poverty, unslaked thirst for learning, revolt against the injustice of fortune which had richly endowed such a man as Clarke, and the fixed idea of the good, beneficent use he would make of the gold, which con- stitute the motive of the crime in Bulwer's Aram. The stage love- story of the past is less effective, for two reasons, —because it jars with the love-story of the present, presented to the audience by the wretched pair of lovers, and because theaudience cannot forget that the real Aram committed a robbery as well as a murder. Bulwer was too skilful to overlook that fact, and he bent all his energies to the palliating of the more hopelessly vulgar crime, while he used the actually existing doubt admitted by the evidence on Eugene Aram's trial to lessen the horror of the more appalling deed. In reality, therefore, Bulwer is closer to the facts than Mr. Wills, whose Eugene Aram is as unhistorical as his Charles L, and like that monarch, loses in dramatic force in proportion as he deviates from the truth. Eugene Aram was not a more learned man than Mr. Watson, nor a milder man than Mr. Palmer, and the really remarkable circumstance of his case was the defence he made for himself. Exclude that, leave out his clever use of the errors of circumstantial evidence, and his dexterous sug- gestion that the skull and skeleton found in a hermit's cave were probably the skull and skeleton of the hermit himself, and the interest and peculiarity attached to the case vanish ; the play might as well" be called Murder Will Out, or The Coward of Conscience, as Eugene Aram.
Much of the dialogue is very prettily written, and there are touches of true poetry, here and there, far superior to anything in Bulwer's novel ; but Mr. Wills's play is deficient in draraatic power, and the usual consequences of the now common departure from the true principles of dramatic authorship implied in a piece with only one character—for whose appearance everyone is impatient, in whose absence every one is bored, and nobody listens—are painfully forced upon the attention of the audience. Ruth Meadows, played by Miss Isabel Bateman, has very uphill work to do ; all coaxing and protesting in the first act, while in the second, where she is for a short time on the stage without her lugubrious lover, she is made almost ludicrously inconsistent. Her one soliloquy is to the effect that she will never question Eugene again about the past, that she will take no notice of his fits of abstraction, but trust him implicitly,—for "love has oft-times died of a question." A stranger (Houseman), incautiously invited to the Parsonage by her father, enters, tells her he is an old acquaint- ance of Eugene Aram's, and the ingenuous, high-minded, modest girl instantly questions this stranger—whose mere aspect might have given her an instinctive warning—about the past life and moody ways of the lover whom she is to marry on the following morning flies into a passion of jealous misery at the insinuation that her middle-aged suitor has loved before, in remote days, all his later years having passed under her own eyes ; and in another scene rates the stranger scornfully—finishing off with a tremendous curtsey—for having answered her own impetuous questions. This is hard work, and Miss Isabel Bateman acquits herself of it very creditably, but it is harder work still in the concluding scene, when she has to listen to Eugene Aram's confession, as he lies grovelling at her feet, without any relief to the silence of pity, horror, anguish, and love. There is nothing for it but to sit still and look picturesque, but the stress of expression is too great, especially in close contact with the wonderful variety and intensity of Mr. Irving's countenance. The superior grouping of the long scene of sustained emotion which closes the drama of Charles L is evident from Miss Bateman's failure in this scene which reverses it, but it would be harsh to blame her severely for the relaxation of expres- sion and the feebleness of gesture which are all but inevitable, especially to an English actress, who has probably never been taught the art of listening, which forms so severe and accurate a branch of French histrionic drill. Let anyone who has seen it recall the attitude in which Madame Amould Plessy, as El- mire, listens to the gossip about Tartufe, in the opening scene of Moliere's great comedy, listens with a score of cautious shades of expression floating over her face,—on which not the faintest con- sciousness of an audience, not the flickering of an eyelash towards the "house," is to be discovered,—and then glides easily into the conversation, and the effect of real, absorbed listening will be re- cognised. Miss Isabel Bateman is very good in the first act, when Aram is to be questioned, and even rallied a little, and in the second, when she makes the touching appeal of a jealous love, and nestling to her lover's heart, unconscious of its dread tenant, prays him to let her "find no other woman there," but otherwise she shares the disadvantage of everyone in the play, except Mr. Irving.
The points of difference between Mathis in The Bells and Eugene Aram are as striking as the points of resemblance ; in both the active passion is remorse, in both it kills, kills at the very moment when the victim, in eaL case "a great sinner, unccudemned," believes himself to be at length emancipated from it ; in both the murderer confesses, and describes his crime in words and action ; but there resemblance ceases. In his impersonation of the unsuspected murderer of the Polish Jew, Mr. Irving has no enemy but himself, and the study is finer, though not nearly so fine as it might have been, had the author's idea been left in its integrity, had not the English adapter resorted to the vulgar expedient of a phantom to produce the effect intended to be the work of conscience only. The close and terrible wrestle of Mathis with the betrayer within his own breast, the tremendous solitude of the murderer's soul, the vain, piteous cunning, the terrific yield- ing up of the seeret,—which yet is never told to the world without,—under the pressure of mental torture made as.visible as the wrenching of the limbs by mechanical cruelty, blend in a per- fect and unique representation, of which his impersonation of Eugene Aram is, in some sense a repetition, but more strictly a variation. The prosperous, calculating, popular, secretive tavern- keeper, who struggles with his haunting fiend, and generally banishes him ; who hoards the stolen gold, and reckons it quand meow ; whose remorse is all throughout so strangely physical, is re- placed by the gentle, pensive, studious teacher, whose enemy has found him, and abides with him ; a shadow in the noon, not only of his love, but of every day, who is hardly glad, even for a moment, even on the eve of his marriage. To Eugene Aram, too, comes detection and ruin, but they come from without, and for a little while the spirit of fierce resistance springs up, and he strives against his fate, in the person of H_ousernau ; but the enemy within sur- renders quickly to the enemy without, and the heart, vanquished by both, numbed with long suffering, wakes up to rage for but a little while before it breaks. The acting of Mr. Irving in this character is wonderfully fine, so deeply impressive that once only, by a bit of ' business ' with lights and a looking-glass quite unworthy of the play and of him, does he remind one that he is acting and not living through that mortal struggle ; so various, that to lose sight of his face for a moment is to lose some expression full of power and of fidelity to the pervading motive of the part. In the first scene with his betrothed Ruth, the pathetic wanness of the face, the faint flicker of the attempted smile, the infinite woe of the look, unseen by her, with which he replies to her question, "Eugene, were you ever gay ? " the frequent slight shudder, the absent yet watchful glance, the recurrent un- easiness about " the stranger," who has asked the gardener for a spade and talked about St. Robert's cave, are of finished skill and perfection. In the second act the anguish of his mind is intensified with every moment, until in the sudden outburst of his fury, his defiance of Houseman, his proud boast of his character in the place and the influence of it, the change, fierc3 yet subtle, from sad and dreamy quiet to the hard, scoffing, worldly wis- dom of the criminal at bay before his accomplice, there is a pcs.i- tive relief for him and for ourselves. Then comes the terror, abject indeed for a while, with desperate breathless rally, thick incoherent speech, failing limbs, ghastly face, dry lips, and clicking throat, as dreadful as only fear can be, and horribly true. The quick gasping sentences he speaks to the old Rector, his return to the room, the infinite anguish of the horror which has seized upon him because men's hands have stirred the moulder- ing remains that for ever haunt his fancy ; the fight of the mind which is torturing with the body which is betraying him, are all perfect ; and if he did not look at himself and talk about his scared face, and then rush out, without tying the white cravat, which streams about him in a wild disorder, not easy to be accounted for to the curious crowd outside, there would be nothing to impair the overwhelming effect. In the conclud- ing scenes, one, in which he sends Houseman flying from the churchyard, appalled at the sight of his suffering; a second, in which, in accents of heartrending grief and contrition, he im- plores heaven for a sign of pardon, and flings himself down by a cross, with an awful face, the white, mute impersonation of mental despair and physical exhaustion ; and a third, in which he makes confession to Ruth, and dies,—the play of his features, the variety and intensity of his expression, are most remarkable. But the dead face of Eugene Aram the murderer is quite unlike the dead face of Mathis the murderer ; the morning sun comes up behind the trees and shines upon the churchyard, Ruth's kneeling figure, and the "great sinner," who has repented and confessed,— white, peaceful, pardoned.
The accessories to the piece are very good, and the scenery is beautiful ; but there is too much garden ; the choir singing from the old church ought to be heard out by itself, and all music that interrupts or disturbs the soliloquies of Eugene Aram ought to be suppressed. The play and the player are both too good for such tawdry and tinkling aide.
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