Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/841

1868.] played like a very clever girl as I am, but it was as much like the real Lady Macbeth as the Great Mogul."

In 1834, she retired definitely from the stage, and except for a brief period in 1851, when she appeared in London, never again returned to it. Her bright, brief career as an actress is one of the glorious memories of the stage, but it is not in connection with the stage that she is most widely known and will be longest remembered.

In 1848, she gave in Boston the first series of those readings which have made her name forever famous, and which have done so much to render Shakespeare properly understood and appreciated. No other living being in this our day and generation, has been able to do for Shakespeare what Mrs. Kemble, owing to the peculiar bent of her genius and her versatility of impersonation, has done. In listening to one of her readings, we have the unexampled pleasure of seeing one of Shakespeare's plays, with each part superbly rendered. Yes, seeing, for do we not forget the dais upon which she sits, the dark red screen behind her, the table with its pile of books—do not these simple surroundings dissolve and melt away into arching forests or palace halls at will? and does not each character step before us in the costume of the day, whether it be Cleopatra dying amid long-forgotten Egyptian splendor, or Titania with her robe of woven moonbeams, or Bottom with his ass's head? Mrs. Kemble is independent of her surroundings the moment they are in her own power, and creates and changes them at will. And she is thus enabled to do for Shakespeare what she could not have done had she remained on the stage; she gives us each one of his characters equally well played, a pleasure never yet enjoyed in the theatre; and I think we are scarcely less struck, on hearing her read any play of his for the first time, by her magnificent impersonation of the principal characters than by the way in which she brings out, individualizes, and makes real the minor ones—nonentities, some of them, in the hands of inferior actors, and very liable to escape us in reading.

In "As You Like It," Rosalind—lovely, arch, passionate, tender Rosalinda—is not more real than Audrey—ignorant, humble, delightfully stupid Audrey. Not a word that Rosalind utters, and we think that she is among the most charming of Mrs. Kemble's impersonations, is more clearly impressed on our memory than the ineffable ignorance and stupidity expressed in Audrey's manner of uttering the words, "I do not know what poetical is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?" In "Macbeth," all the parts in which she makes as distinct as she does deeply tragic. Lady Macbeth is not more terrible than, in their way, are the three witches. This whole scene, which Shakespeare evidently did not mean to make grotesque, but terrible, is travestied on the stage; but in Mrs. Kemble's hands it is what it was meant to be, wild, weird, appalling. She is not simply a hag, she is a hag possessed by a fiend. What absolutely hellish joy lights up her face as she stirs the cauldron! With what an indescribable accent of malice and cruelty does she utter the refrain,

And this same face which can so embody the glare of a fiend, these lips which can utter a fiend's adjuration, can give the look, the smile of Titania, reproducing with equal fidelity the flower-like grace, the fairy-like evanescent loveliness of one of the most delicate of Shakespeare's creations!

It is precisely this versatility of impersonation, this mobility of countenance, this flexibility of voice, which combine with her great genius to make Mrs.