On Parting With Actors

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IT is a somewhat trying experience, be our good will what it may, to have to listen to what Forrest and Charlotte Cushman were in their high noon of power ; though far less so, of course, to scan in the pages of Lamb or Hunt the vital lineaments of eccentric and beloved comedians. The glamour of the relation is never quite communicable. No one can well imagine the bygone stage, nor has any pen or brush the divine magic which can force us to do so. All in it and about it is fleeting, imponderable : its conceptions, as has been touchingly said, are modeled in snow. And being, in their nature, most intimately leagued with the soul they are meant for, it is by a beautiful process of adaptation that they live nowhere else, and scorn independent existence. For the least birth under the laws of poetry, as of architecture, is concrete, though for the moment in no contact with man ; even music is potential upon a library page, folded away for centuries from the sound of strings ; but there is no Garrick, nor any Mrs. Siddons, except in enthusiastic tradition. We who honor them on hearsay act on a general principle : it must, we think, have been very great and sincere art to have awakened, even in that more sentimental past, such great and sincere laudation: but all oral, all written report, helps us little to form a genuine idea of these Richards, Belvideras, Mirabels, of our grandfathers. Nor can the generation after us, in like manner, do more than half believe the panegyrics passed upon our favorites of the theatre. Each is of necessity incredulous of the other : perhaps because the things of its own youth are the only oracle, perhaps because it has never had — not, indeed, the joy of knowing Kean, but the soul-intoxicating pleasure of losing him ! The parting which is “ sweet sorrow ” is the parting of the stage.

It is a luxurious agony, that chance to say Good-by. We come processionally, with scrolls and flowers, to give our friends across the footlights “ the wage and dues of death.” We would fain be summoned to look our last upon the faces which never wore a shadow, yet drove our dullness and care afar ; to gather, with a glow of recognition, all that was and had been between us from long ago ; to shed a common tear, perhaps, and so pour a common libation ; to take on the porcelain of our own minds the whole warm-hued picture, the Watteau masterpiece of a minute ; and pass to other worlds with a triumphant remembrance, never to be washed away, of what our own best pleasures were in this, and what the mien, the accent, the soul’s form and fire, of those who gave them. This sort of enchantment worked upon the auditor is the actor’s special glory, and his top of attainment. The public is fickle, cruel, forgetful: an epicure of effects. He who is ill and absent, and returns, or he who is long at a disadvantage, from some unjust cause, and yet, for one reason or another, plays on and on, moving here and there, ever less conspicuously, sees himself annulled in the memory of the stalls before his hour. “ And the name died before the man.” A deliberate parting, at almost any time in his dramatic life, seems to him a terrible moral extravagance. Such it is ; yet there are none who cannot afford it. It is the inexpedient master-stroke. If actors but knew it, and acted upon it earlier, there is nothing so exquisite they can achieve as a deliberate farewell ; and better than the bravest final tour is the single final occasion. The leave-taking of a national favorite still young at heart, still equipped to win, is comparable to the finest deaths of romance, and as sure as they of moving hearts. In an art where everything must pass without abiding memorial, it is of the utmost consequence that the final impression, at least, upon contemporaries shall be vivid, and bitten in by some poignancy of affectionate admiration. Any other consummation is debased. Our heroes and heroines, “ happy - starred, full-blooded spirits,” must not, so to speak, die in their beds. We demand of our beneficiaries, in their perfect prime (and we do it with elegant disregard of all non-sesthetic considerations) nothing less than professional suicide. As they stand there, bowing themselves out, after a last victorious evening, they have indeed drained the poison-cup, and won immortality. Their garments, as they sweep through our day-dreams, can have now no frayed edges, as if they had worn themselves out in our service. They shall be a complete legend, an intact precedent; they shall never be forgotten. Every boy in the galleries who catches, like a spark in air, those arch, urbane, finger-tip kisses, tossed vanishingly from the wings, and is alive fifty years after, must be forever comparing the radiant women he knew with the strange new puppets of degenerate fashion. He must be forever growling : —

To have one such expression of passionate loyalty from any old lover is vindication enough for a player. And nothing secures it, nothing inlays it in lasting gold, like the willful rupture, at some tenderest moment, of the closest tie in all the arts.