The passion for stage representations is almost universal. It has withstood all the attacks which the abusers of the drama have, in every age, excited; and it does not seem to have lost any vigor by the changes of time. It is really capable of being made an instrument of the highest and most refined pleasure. Through the theatre, the great works of some of the world’s greatest poets are introduced to the people, and brought home to the eye and the heart with peculiar vividness and power. To be a good actor is a distinction limited to a very few. The person who can act Hamlet or Macbeth, Juliet or Cordelia, so as to impress large multitudes with a new sense of their beauty and power, is entitled to no small amount of admiration and respect we award to intellectual achievement. Of late, it appears to us, there has been a fresh interest taken in theatrical exhibitions; and as it seems to be a settled point that there will be a theatre in every large city, everything which indicates a revival of the true dramatic spirit, everything which exhibits the theatre in a favorable light, should excite no common pleasure.

In view of this, it is with peculiar satisfaction that we hail the appearance of an actress, who brings to the stage the delicacy of feeling and the graces of mind and manner, nurtured and developed in private life. Previous to her debut last summer, Mrs. Mowatt had been favorably known as an authoress. Her contributions, in verse and prose, to various periodicals, her comedy of “Fashion,” and her novel of “Evelyn,” displayed a brilliant, versatile and observing mind, with a fine feminine perception both of the serious and ludicrous in character and feeling. But giving all due credit to her literary compositions, no one could see her act, without deciding at once that she possessed capacities which had been but imperfectly developed in her writings, and that her genius was more especially calculated for the stage than for any other field in which her fine and rare powers could be exercised. We happened to be present on the evening of her first appearance, and received there a new impression of her imaginative power, and singular depth, intensity and subtlety of feeling. She trod the stage with a seeming unconsciousness of the presence of an audience, and appeared to possess, no merely the power to produce an illusion in the minds of others that she was the character she embodied, but to be under the influence of that illusion herself – the greatest merit that can be awarded to an actress on her debut.

The great merit of Mrs. Mowatt’s acting, and the highest merit of any acting, is the force and refinement of imagination she displays in the embodiment of character. Her mind, we should judge, is uncommonly flexible and fluid, and rises or falls into the moulds of character with singular ease. She reproduces the creation of the poet in her own imagination – makes all its thoughts and emotions real to herself – stamps on the expression of each the peculiar individuality she is representing, and loses all sense of herself in the vividness of her realization of the part. She ensouls as well as embodies her characters. This gives vital life to her personation, and distinguishes her from all those who merely avail themselves of the mechanical contrivances of elocution. A vivifying soul pervades and animates her acting, and makes itself “felt along the heart” of her audience. By conceiving character in the concrete, though the instinctive processes of imagination, she preserves the unity of character amid all the variety of its manifestation. This can never be done by the mere understanding. The custom of some actors, of deducing, by logical rules, the character from the text, and then personating that deduction, makes their acting mechanical and lifeless, and leaves on the mind of the hearer no unity of impression. This individuality is especially difficult to preserve in those characters, in whom there is going on, though the play, a process of change or development – whose minds are modified by new positions and new motives – and in whom we trace the stream of the same individual being from the moment it is first ruffled by passion to the period when it sweeps and rushes on with the mad impetuosity of a torrent. The difference between understanding a part and conceiving it, measures the difference between the actor of talent and the actor of genius. We may admire the first, but we are conquered and borne away by the second. The actor of imagination also performs with more subtlety, gives more pertinence to all the refinements of the author’s meaning, and fuses the different parts into a more proportioned and concrete whole, than can possibly be done by the most patient actor who follows the method of the understanding. As the understanding never yet created character, so it can never represent it. It will always work “from the flesh inwards, instead of from the heart outwards.”

In the most important intellectual requisite of acting, we therefore think Mrs. Mowatt to be preeminently gifted: and from the extreme ductility of her imagination, she is capable of indefinite improvement in her profession, and of embodying, eventually, almost all varieties of character. To this great mental advantage she joins singular advantages of person. Her form is slight, graceful and flexible, and her face fine and pure, with that strangeness in the expression which Bacon deemed essential to all beauty. In personal appearance she is altogether the most ideal-looking woman we ever saw on the stage. Her voice well justifies the impression which would be received from her appearance. In its general tone it is the perfection of clear sweetness, and is capable of great variety of modulation. She does not seem herself aware of all its capabilities, or fully to have mastered its expression. In passages of anguish, fear, horror, pride, supplication, she often brings out tones, which seem the very echoes of the heart’s emotions, and which indicate the most remarkable powers of vocal expression.

In the last act of “The Bride of Lammermoor” and, especially, in the fourth act of “Romeo and Juliet,” these latent capacities of voice are developed with wondrous effect. The exquisite beauty and purity of her voice, however, are best evinced in the expression of sentiment and pathos – in the clear, bird-like carol of tone with which she gives utterance to inwards content and blissfulness – in the expression of affection gushing directly from the heart, or springing from it in wild snatches of music – in the sportive and sparkling utterance of thoughts and feelings steeped in the heart’s most gladdening sunshine – and in that wide-wandering remoteness of tone which gives a kind of unearthly significance to objects viewed through the mystical light of imagination.

A few remarks on some of the characters in which Mrs. Mowatt appears will, we hope, justifiy the high estimate we have expressed of her capacity, by a reference to facts gathered from a scrutiny of her acting in each. One of her most pleasing and popular personations is Pauline, in Bulwer’s “Lady of Lyons.” In this we do not think she has even a rival. No actress that we have seen, English or American, approaches her in this character. Her conception of it is fresh and original, and in its embodiment she supplies even the deficiencies of the author, who is not much skilled in characterization. Though we, by no means think that her Pauline is a fair measure of her powers, her representation of the part more than exhausts its whole capacity of effectiveness. She has seized, with the intuitive quickness of imagination, what Bulwer aimed to produce in the delineation of Pauline, and converted his intention into a living, breathing reality. In the third, fourth and fifth acts of the play, her acting is characterized by great force, refinement and variety. In the expression of that confusion of mind and motives, produced by a conflict of antagonist passions, each maddening the brain and tugging at the heart-strings, her whole action is masterly and original. Scorn, contempt, love, hatred, shame, fear, hope, pride, humility, despair, meet and part, and chase each other in tumultuous succession; every emotion, as it sweeps abruptly across her heart, mirrored in her face, speaking in her gesture – giving significance to every movement of her frame. The whole personation, commencing with the vain, proud, romantic girl – conducting her through shame and mortification to the very verge of despair and death – her heart, after its first mad burst of rage, becoming the more beautiful and noble the more it is crushed, and finally ending, after her long ordeal of sorrow, in happiness and love – is most powerful and effective. The character, as Mrs. Mowatt performs it, gives considerable play to a variety of emotions, ranging from the most graceful sentiment to deep passion, and it also full of ravishing beauties. In the second act, she displays that singular power of expressing insight in the world of imagination, which, in its varios modifications by circumstance and character, lends a charm to all her personations. When Claude describes his imaginary gardens by the Lake of Como, she sees them as realities before her eyes – is blind to everything else; her face has that fine indefiniteness of look which represents the triumph of sensuous imagination over the senses – the bloom and fragrance of the flowers, and the musical gush of the waterfalls, are the only objects before her mind – and her whole soul seems absorbed in a soft and delicious dream. The effect is most exquisite, and it is so perfect that its meaning cannot but flash on the dullest and least imaginative auditor.

In the characters of Lady Teazle, Juliana, and “The Duchess,” Mrs. Mowatt shows great talent for genteel Comedy. Her Lady Teazle, played here las summer to Placide’s Sir Peter, was capital. The Duchess, in “Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady,” is a part to which she does full justice, and she makes it very effective and brilliant. Juliana, however, in Tobin’s “Honeymoon,” is her best character in comedy. This gives more scope to her powers than the others. Her personation of it comes very near perfection. The felicity with which she keeps to the truth of character, is well illustrated in this part. Juliana is subject to some of the same passions and weaknesses as Pauline, though her individuality is different. Mrs. Mowatt never suggests the character of the one in her representation of the other. Love, pride, shame, as she acts them in Pauline, have little in common with the same feelings as they appear in Juliana – so strong is her sense of the individuality of emotion. Her brisk, bright, sparkling acting in Tobin’s peevish and shrewish heroine – the quickness of tone, gesture and movement, with which she animates every part – the unconscious tact with which she gives continually the impression that, beneath all the vixenish outbreaks of the proud girl, there dwells purity and goodness of heart – make her personation of the character one of the most delightful we ever witnessed. Throughout the play there is nothing to interrupt the feeling of pleasure which she gives from the first. No person can have an idea of the variety of her acting, and the singular flexibility of her mind, without seeing her in two widely different characters – Juliana and Juliet. Each of these she represents to the life, and yet, from her acting in one, none could suppose her capacity to impersonate the other.

One of Mrs. Mowatt’s most pathetic personations, is Mrs. Haller, in “The Stranger.” This, to be appreciate, should be judged by comparison with her Mariana, in Knowles’ play of “The Wife.” The latter, as represented by Mrs. Mowatt, is most exquisite for its moral beauty. It leaves on the heart and imagination an impression of sweetness, simplicity, purity, devotedness and heroism, which cannot be forgotten. Though, in this character, she is not so perfect as in many others, in the minor graces of stage effect, it is still one of her very best parts, and one in which she will eventually gain great fame. The extreme subtlety of her imagination, and her capaticty to represent feeling of the most ideal purity, are finely shown in it. We never appreciated the beauty of this character until we saw Mrs. Mowatt embody it. The contrast between Marianna the Wife, and Mrs. Haller the wife, as it appears in her personation of both, is felt to be as great as it is in nature. In Mrs. Haller there is a stifled, broken-hearted sorrow and repentance for guilt committed; in Mariana there is hardly the consciousness of the idea of guilt. Her mind is one of those “sacred fountains” of purity,

“Which, though shapes of ill

May hover round its surface, glides in light,

And takes no shadow from them.”

The last scene of the play, in which Mariana recognizes her brother, and the long intense and soul-absorbing gaze with which she watches the last traces of vitality in his dying face, is almost sublime in its affectionateness.

The character of Lucy Ashton, in the “Bride of Lammermoor,” dramatized from Scott’s novel of that name, is another of Mrs. Mowatt’s beautiful and pathetic personations. None of her performances equal this in the depth of the pathetic impression it leaves on the heart. She acts the character fully up to Scott’s delineation of it. At first she appears merely as the guiltless and confiding girl, her affections clinging innocently to others for support; and the terrible ordeal of fear, horror, anguish and agony, ending in “helpless, hopeless brokenness of heart” which succeeds, pierces into the inmost core of our sympathies. Mrs. Mowatt’s power of imagination is grandly displayed in this drama. In the second and last acts she has touches of genius of the highest order. Her trances of imagination, in these acts, in which her eyes are open but heir “sense is shut,” and the objects before her mind destroy all perception of external things, are very great. In the last scene, her tottering walk across the stage to sign the marriage contract – her scream when Ravenswood bursts into the room, with her statue-like insensibility afterwards, in which her whole frame seems freezing with horror – her “Touch me not, mother!” as Lady Ashton approaches to sever her from her lover, in those few words loosening from her heart its whole burden of agony and supernatural fear – and the death which ends her long and terrible suffering – are in the noblest vein of tragic pathos. The closeness with which she embodies character is finely displayed in this part. It is like nothing else she performs. An instinctive restraint keeps down everything which would clash with the vital elements of the character. Its boundaries, both of thought and emotion, she never passes, and yet there is not the slightest appearance of that constraint, indicating a sense of the necessity of keeping to the truth of character. She is not thinking of Lucy Ashton, and adapting her acting to the thought, but, for the time, she is Lucy Ashton. She reproduces in her own heart and imagination the overpowering pathos of the part, and loses all sense of self in its intense realization.

But her greatest character, and the one which best indicates what she will eventually do in her profession, is her impersonation of Shakespeare’s complex and passionate creation, Juliet. Here, her acting is not only great in itself, but triumphs over difficulties which we should have deemed insuperable. It will not only bear the usual test of stage criticism, but if tried by the most rigid requisitions of the poetical critics and interpreters of Shakespeare, it will stand even that test. It is Shakespeare’s own Juliet, in her ideal beauty, purity, simplicity, pathos, affection and passionateness –Juliet the girl, and Juliet the wife – Juliet as she appears when surveyed through the hallowing light of the imagination. Mrs. Mowatt’s personation is absolutely wonderful for its combination of naturalness with ideality, sweetness with power. An elaborate criticism of her performance, noticing her embodiment, not merely of the character, in its individuality, but of all its exquisite parts and minor refinements, is not now our intention, though the subject is a tempting one. The balcony scene, as played by her, has the remoteness of imagination; it is a poem, assuming shape before the very eye. In the last scene of the fourth act, where she takes the sleeping draught, her action and expression are thrilling. She gives sensation to imagination, loses the perception of everything but the horrible images which come thronging and crowding into her brain, and at last staggers deliriously to her couch, and sinks down exhausted and faint from the mad whirl of her fancies. We have no space to do justice to the exquisite grace, beauty and purity of the earlier scenes with her parents, with the nurse, and, above all, with Romeo. In these, her wealth of affection overflows in the riches poetry of the heart. The variety of thought and emotion she throws into the representation, and the subordination of all to the unity of the character, are quite remarkable, when we consider the process of modification and development which is going on in Juliet’s mind during the play. There is nothing pretty, or silly, or lovesick, in her impersonation; but all is bathed in a rich ideal light, penetrated by the most artless affection, or intense passion; and reaching into the heart like the sweetest or most piercing music. No one can appreciate the beauty or power of Mrs. Mowatt’s voice, without hearing it in connection with Shakespeare’s poetry.

Her success in Juliet indicates the range of characters she is best calculated to embody, and to succeed in which is worthy the noblest ambition – we mean Shakespeare’s women. The higher female characters of Shakespeare, Desdemona, Ophelia, Viola, Imogen, Miranda, Perdita, Cordelia and the like, have never yet been adequately represented on the stage, as ideal creations. Indeed, their marvelous loveliness has rarely been appreciated until the present day, when a large and loving criticism has developed their latent beauties and meaning. To act Cordelia, so as to affect and audience as the character affects the reader, would be a greater triumph even, than fitly to embody Lady Macbeth. For this class of ideal characters, Mrs. Mowatt’s genius and person are admirably calculated. She is more likely to succeed in them, from the fact that her mind and heart have had full opportunities for genial development in private life, and from the refinement of thought and feeling which she brings to the stage from that station. We think she has sufficient power, flexibility and fineness of imagination, to achieve this difficult work; and we may not say what measure of fame would wait upon her success.

P.

Charleston, S.C.

“The Acting Stage – Mrs. Mowatt.”

The American Review, Vol. II,

No. 17, Feb. 1846. Pages 207 -211

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