Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/244

 368 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS seemed to gain height by reason of her slenderness, who moved toward her audi ence with such simple natural majesty, who wore and conducted her fluent clas- sical draperies with such admirable and perfect grace. It was as though she had lived always so attired in tunic, peplum, and pallium — had known no other dress — not that she was of modern times playing at antiquity, she was the muse of Greek tragedy in person. The physical traditions of her race found expression or incarnation in her. Her face was of refined Judaical character — the thin nose slightly curved, the lower lip a trifle full, but the mouth exquisitely shaped, and the teeth small, white, and even. The profuse black-brown hair was smoothed and braided from the broad, low, white, somewhat over-hanging brow, beneath which in shadow the keen black eyes flashed out their lightnings, or glowed lu- ridly like coals at a red heat. Her gestures were remarkable for their dignity and appropriateness ; the long, slight arms lent themselves surprisingly to graceful- ness ; the beautifully formed hands, with the thin tapering fingers and the pink filbert nails, seemed always tremblingly on the alert to add significance or accent to her speeches. But there was eloquence in her very silence and complete re- pose. She could relate a whole history by her changes of facial expression. She possessed special powers of self-control ; she was under subjection to both art and nature when she seemed to abandon herself the most absolutely to the whirl- wind of her passion. There were no undue excesses of posture, movement, or tone. Her attitudes, it was once said, were those of " a Pythoness cast in bronze." Her voice thrilled and awed at its first note : it was so strangely deep, so solemnly melodious, until, stirred by passion as it were, it became thick and husky in certain of its tones ; but it was always audible, articulate, and telling, whether sunk to a whisper or raised clamorously. Her declamation was superb, if, as critics reported, there had been decline in this matter during those later years of her life, to which my own acquaintance with Rachel's acting is confined. I saw her first at the Francais in 1849, an d I was present at her last performance at the St. James* Theatre in 1853, having in the interval witnessed her assump- tion of certain of her most admired characters. And it may be true, too, that, like Kean, she was more and more disposed, as the years passed, to make " points," to slur over the less important scenes, and reserve herself for a grand outburst or a vehement climax, sacrificing thus many of the subtler graces, re- finements, and graduations of elocution, for which she had once been famous. To English ears, it was hardly an offence that she broke up the sing-song of the rhymed tirades of the old plays and gave them a more natural sound, regardless of the traditional methods of speech of Clairon, Le Kain, and others of the great French players of the past. Less success than had been looked for attended Rachel's invasion of the repertory of Mile. Mars, an actress so idolized by the Parisians that her sixty years and great portliness of form were not thought hindrances to her persona- tion of the youthful heroines of modern comedy and drama. But Rachel's fittest occupation and her greatest triumphs were found in the classical poetic pkys. She, perhaps, intellectualized too much the creations of Hugo, Dumas, and