Page:Mrs. Siddons (IA mrssiddons00kennrich).pdf/136

124 her great triumph. But we doubt if she had not already mastered the idea of chilling and terrifying her audience when, as she describes, she worked herself into a paroxysm of terror on first studying the part as a young girl. The physical power and confidence to communicate that terror were hers now, but the intellectual comprehension had been there before, and certainly did not increase; on the contrary, it deteriorated with years. The power of fresh comprehension passed away, and with it the elasticity and variety of her earlier effects; and from being singularly simple and direct, she became stagey and artificial. An artist gets certain words to utter; he gets the skeleton sketch, as it were, of the character he has to portray, but the emphasis and passion he puts into them, which go direct from his heart to the heart of his audience, must be his, and his alone, and must be as little as possible the effect of study or deliberation. Thus the ingredients of terror, ambition, and wifely and maternal love, were the uncomplex emotions at first impressed on Mrs. Siddons's brain by the study of the part; and those were the predominating influences by which she swayed her audience to the last day she acted it.

Many are the records that we have of this great performance—all the world has heard of the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons—but, alas! how insufficient are they to give us an idea of the wondrous reality. The weird-like tones, that sent an involuntary shudder through the house; the bewildered melancholy; and, lastly, the piteous cry of the strong heart broken, have come down to us as traditions; but the grandeur of her majesty, the earnest accents as the demon of the character took possession of her, must ever remain