MR. PECHTER'S OTHELLO.
MR. Fechter's only great defect — and it is a defect almost essentially connected with his highest powers—is the want of any true abandon in his manner in those characters and scenes in which all pretence of self-guidance is entirely dropped, and the mind drifts with its own thoughts or passions. This was the defect of his Hamlet. There was no reverie, no possibility of reverie in his pre. sentation of the Prince of Denmark : he thought, but he never dreamed, he never meditated. This is almost the only defect in his Othello. While the poison is being poured into his mind, while the play of conflicting fears is still kept up, while even the presence of others half restrains the boiling passion in his heart, Mr. Fechter's impersonation is almost perfect,—certainly as grand a delineation of the tormenting rage and anguish of distrust as it is possible to con- ceive. But when for a moment all restraints are loosed, when Othello abandons himself in solitude to the tide of ungoverned passion, we are immediately sensible of something hard and lashed- up in his manner. It is not that he underacts the passion—as we have seen it asserted—but that he cannot simulate the requisite spontaneousness of feeling. Mr. Fechter is unrivalled when he is princely, scornful, intellectually contemptuous; and he is, if anything, still more powerful—which we were by no means prepared to expect when he is being played upon by others, and summons up into his face the flashes of suffering, hatred, and terror which the part requires. No one who has once beheld him in the scene in which Iago narrates to Othello his grounds for suspecting Cassio's guilt with his wife can ever doubt—as from his impersonation of Hamlet we were inclined to doubt—his marvellous power of portraying passion. The contracted and almost contorted frame, the raised shoulders, the large unclear whites of his turbidly gleaming eyes as they shoot oblique glances of physical fury mixed with dread at his informer, the visible spasms as barb after barb enters, the blood- thirsty insanity which comes over his countenance when the gift of Desdemona's handkerchief to Cassio is mentioned, present one of the most marvellous dramatic pictures on which the eye can dwell. Mr. Fechter has one or two great physical advantages for such a part, which have, no doubt, their weight in inducing him to prefer the cha- racter of Othello to the still more striking one of Ingo. The lurid whites of his eyes, which jarred very painfully with the dreamy cha- racter of Hamlet, seem expressly intended to image the jealous fury of Othello's Moorish blood. Then, in both Hamlet and Othello, there is a superficial sensuousness of temperament evi- dently not alien to Mr. Fetcher's own. But still, no doubt, it is far more to his art than to any natural gift that he owes his power to give such terrible vividness to the whole physique of Othello—to convey so marvellously the impression of that half-savage physical intensity of emotion which culminates in Othello's epilepsy. In connexion with this wonderful portraiture of Othello's physique we must, however, notice an extravagant conceit, which is not worthy of so thoughtful an actor. Mr. Fechter is exceedingly anxious—and rightly anxious—to render truly Othello's constant dread of the repelling effect of his dark skin on Desdemona's senses—a most essential current of feeling throughout the play. But there is one most absurd and unnatural attempt to force this feeling into a passage where it has no concern, where all such feelings are swallowed up in the fierce struggle between pity, horror, and re- venge, by the death-bed of his victim. Here is Mr. Fechter's virtual interpretation of the passage, as conveyed in his stage directions : " Omuta.° (who, during the last couplet, comes slowly forward to look at Desdemona, accidentally touches the glass, in which he sees his bronzed face with bitter despair). It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,— [Retiring to the window, his eyes fixed on the heavens. Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!— [Looking at his face again.
It is the cause.— [Se violently throws the glass into the sea ; then goes to the door, locks it, advances to the bed, half drawing his sward; then suddenly stops, and returns it to the scabbard.
Yet I'll not shed her blood; Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die."
Mr. Fechter wishes to make Othello's colour the "cause" of which he speaks, and evidently supposes that this "motives" the change of resolution implied in "yet I'll not shed her blood ; nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow." But this interpretation seems supremely forced and trivial. Possibly, indeed, Shakspeare did mean to convey in this renewed reference to the snowy whiteness of Des- demona's skin some passing renewal of the pang as to the darkness of his own, but whether this be so or not, it seems to us absolutely certain that the "yet," is not to be construed as proving that he had been dwelling on this as the original " cause" of the whole tragedy. Othello is trying to justify his own resolution to kill her, to stifle the shrinkings of his conscience by dwelling on the depth of guilt which he believed himself to be punishing. This, if it were not otherwise clear, would be sufficiently so when he says, " Let me not name it to yon, you chaste stars !— It is the cause l"— and then, turning to the bed, he sees her "whiter than snow" and "smooth as monumental alabaster," and says to himself that, though he must kill her, yet he will not mar that beauty by shedding her blood. To refer the " cause" to his own dark skin, is to substitute for those last hesitations of love and tremblings of conscience, which imply a mind strung up to the last effort, a morbid suggestion which had exhausted its power long ago, as one of the many conspiring cir- cumstances which seemed to lend probability to Desdemona's guilt, and which, if reintroduced here, would imply that Othello was not only rearguing the whole question, but dwelling on the slightest of all the threads of presumption. The whole of this soliloquy shows Othello with the certainty of Desdemona's guilt utterly fixed in his mind, but yet starting back in horror on the edge of murder. He stimulates himself by contemplating the depths of his victim's guilt ; still he cannot mar her beauty, and looking on that beauty, he cannot help recoiling from an act so irrevocable as putting out a light which nothing can rekindle Everything shows his mind to be in the last spasm of revulsion from the fatal plunge, or absorbed in the consideration of the terrible " how"—whether by sword or pillow. It is not a moment when he would retrace one of the ori- ginal reasons for her infidelity, even though one painfully per- sonal to himself. Mr. Fechter has here clearly caricatured the sensuous element in Othello's credulousness, at the expense, too, of his shrinking conscience and affection. Partly for this reason, partly for the one with which we commenced our criticism, the scene of the murder strikes us as throughout the least effective. Othello has thrown off all self-control, and after the first hesitation, which Mr. Fechter misinterprets, he abandons himself on the waking, and after the murder, of Desdemona, to the tide of involuntary
passions which are crowding into his breast. Here Mr. Fechter strikes us as not fully equal to his part. There is a hardness about his lower tones ; they sound as if they did not come from the bottom of a deeply-stirred heart, but from a false bottom of intellectual effort.
If there be a fault in Mr. Fechter's general conception of the play, it is, we think, that he rather overdoes the murderousness of Othello's jealousy, and disregards the reluctant starts of his con- science, while he also somewhat diminishes the force of the network of circumstances by which the Moor is enmeshed. In Shakspeare's play, Othello is represented as informed of the murder of Casio before he goes to Desdemona's room. He hears Castio's cry in the
street, and passes on, saying : " 'Tis he ;-0 brave Iago, honest and just, Thou best such noble sense of thy friend's wrong! Thou teachest me,—Minion your dear lies dead, And your fate hies apace."
And so he goes to the scene with the knowledge, as he supposes, of one murder on his conscience already committed. We think it is a mistake in Mr. Fechter's acting edition to omit this passage. The blood already shed, adds a powerful sting to the passion of Othello's recklessness ; and incidentally we may notice that if Mr. Fechter had remembered that Othello goes in to Desdemona muttering : " Thy bed lust-stained shall with lust's blood be spotted," he would have had a clearer understanding of the train of feelings which lead him to say, "yet I'll not shed her blood." While pleading, however, for more genuine signs of moral recoil from the murder than Mr. Pechter admits, we must do justice to his noble rendering of the passage where Othello first directs Iago to set his wife to watch Desdemona. The start of shame which he gives as the words escape him, and the abrupt "Leave me !" prove that the high generosity in Othello's nature is fully appreciated by Mr. Fechter.
But masterly as his acting is in Othello, we could not see the play without regretting most deeply that Mr. Fechter did. not take the part of Iago. It is impossible to conceive it worse acted than it is acted by Mr. Ryder. Low, very low cunning, as modified by oc- casional rant, is that gentleman's only conception of the Italian's part. Ingo is one of Shakspeare's most elaborate efforts. His intellect is meant to be an intellect of a very high order, sceptical, scornful, cold, malicious. He does not disguise from himself Othello's native good- ness. He looks evil in the face with an intellectual relish—a de- light in the creative power of his own mind, which is, as it were, the evil side of true art. When he says,
"'Tie here, but yet confused; Knavery's plain face is never seen, till used,"
he is a perfect impersonation of a fertile mind rejoicing in the inspi- ration of conscious evil as stroke after stroke of the dark picture rises before him. It is no common task to represent this together with the Italian passion, the contempt for women, the covetousness, and the general malice of temper, with which his immediate design is coloured. It would be an attempt worthy of Mr. Fechter's highest powers, and, if we mistake not, well adapted to the scope of those powers. Mr. Ryder could not be worse in Othello than he is in /ago, and probably would not be so bad. At all events, it would be far more tolerable to hear him ranting a comparatively simple part, than parodying one of such complex and subtle power.
We may add that the scenery is exceedingly good, and that the part of Itoderigo, Iago's dupe, is performed with real art by Mr. J. S. Shore. The weak, irresolute impatience and resentment,— and still more the skill with which he lights up his vacant face with foolish smiles, as Iago holds out one hope after another, is, in its small way, striking enough. Desdemona we were not sorry to see smothered. Miss Leclercq was better suited for Ophelia of her two characters, and not very well suited, except by a pretty face, for either. The earnest simplicity which belongs to Desdemona is badly exchanged for the irritating charmingness of ordinary young ladyism. In his Desdemona Mr. Fechter is unfortunate ; in his Iago worse than unfortunate; but only the more closely is the spectator's atten- tion riveted on the single centre of interest which is presented by the mobile features and grand bearing of the tortured Moor.
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