Siddons and Rachel by Frederick Wedmore — Read

Two little books by Mrs. A. Kennard -- contributions to the ‘Eminent Women' series -- give with much tact and grace of treatment all that the ordinary reader, if not quite all the special student, needs to know about the two great tragic actresses of England and of France. With regard to both, the special student may ask, perhaps, for more of theatrical criticism, for an analysis more elaborate of that which was accomplished in sight of the public, by the two famous artists. Yet, as regards Sarah Siddons -- a tragedian removed from us now by the space of three generations -- there may well have been difficulties. Rachel, of course, lived in a period of criticism more diffuse and systematic; Jules Janin filling, in her day, to some extent, the place since filled by Vitu and Sarcey; and, indeed, the published records of her performances, though scattered, are elaborate and abundant. Turning from the public achievement to the private character, little else remains to be told of Mrs. Siddons; but of Rachel there might have been produced many a scandalous chronicle. Wrong from one point of view, Mrs. Kennard, in this matter, was certainly right from another. Of the ‘Dichtung' and the ‘Wahrheit,' which meet in the life of the artist, she has taken, in some respects, chiefly the ‘Dichtung. ' ‘We have tried,' she says herself, in her preface, ‘to extract the poetry and romance there is to be found in this life, rejecting what is base and unworthy. ' Nor must it, after all, be supposed that in Rachel's life -- outside her art -- all was unworthy or base. Always she was a dutiful daughter; always a devoted mother; sometimes a generous, and once or twice a constant, friend. But her life was a fever. And, in her maddened demand for excitement, it ran its course rapidly.

How different all this matter was with Mrs. Siddons! Rachel was a Jewess, born in an inn in Switzerland, and bred in France; a Bohemian who, after twenty-four hours of enforced respectability at Windsor, ‘_avait besoin de s'encanailler_' -- thirsted to be a cad again. Mrs. Siddons was an Englishwoman; even the Irish blood, not quite absent from her veins, was without influence on her personal life -- we are far from saying it did not prompt her to be an artist. And not only was she an Englishwoman; she was a Kemble besides, and rigid self-control was the very watchword of the Kembles, in art and life. We are told she had ‘the gift of tears. ' It may be. Certainly she roused in others pity and passion. But when one recognises this, one may remember, too, how the methods acceptable to one age may be ineffective in another. Mrs. Siddons's epoch was the epoch of the acceptability of Claude's and David's art. It was the age of firm contour in draughtsmanship, of composition in painting, of deportment in manners. In manhood, the age admired as ideal what Mr. Turveydrop, some time afterwards, only unwittingly burlesqued. The fire, and genius, and spontaneity of Rachel would speak to us to-day. Rachel gave to the most artificial of tragedy -- to the tragedy which was ‘so Greek' to its admirers, so full of Louis xiv. to ourselves -- that truth which Desclée, after her, bestowed upon an incident in the Avenue du Roi de Rome -- upon a passion of this morning. Should we be equally sensible to the favourite effects of Mrs. Siddons? Should we -- who have passed not only through Romanticism, but into Naturalism, since her day -- be impressed, genuinely or profoundly, by her Lady Macbeth, her Hermione?