Part 16 (2/2)
Tributes to her genius came from all quarters, from friend and foe, from her compatriots and from foreigners alike. Voltaire, when she performed in his little theatre at Ferney, went quite wild with enthusiasm, and declared that, for the first time in his life, he had seen perfection in any kind.[163] Favart, though severely reprobating the extravagance of the admirers who had medals struck in the lady's honour,[164] cherished for her the most profound admiration. ”Mlle. Clairon,” he writes to the Count Durazzo, ”is raised so far above criticism by the superiority of her talents that all the remarks of the most punctilious censor can but serve to convince me that she has attained the last degree of perfection. It seems as if she owed only to Nature all that she has acquired by a.s.siduous study. Every day we are struck with some new admiration.”
Colle, who disliked her heartily, partly no doubt on account of her friends.h.i.+p with the philosophers, writing in 1750, considers her inferior to Mlle. Dumesnil in sentimental scenes, but acknowledges her immense superiority to the latter ”in parts requiring little energy and much dignity,” such as the heroines of Corneille and the Fulvie of Crebillon's _Catilina_. He, however, severely criticises her delivery, which he describes as ”artificial and inflated to the last extreme.”
But, five years later, when Mlle. Clairon had adopted the more natural method of speaking and acting of which we shall presently speak, the dramatist is all admiration:--
”I have seen _L'Orphelin_ [Voltaire's _L'Orphelin de la Chine_], and wept at the second and fifth acts. Mlle. Clairon appears to merit even more praise than she has received. It is the actress, and not the play, that has moved me. This tragedy is bad, and I do not retract a single word of what I have said about it; but the actress is admirable. She improves every day; she is ridding herself little by little of her declamatory style, and making great strides towards natural acting. If she continues, she will attain to the art of the Lecouvreur. The progress which she has made is too marked and too astonis.h.i.+ng for us not to expect still further improvement; perhaps we may even hope for perfection.”[165]
The _Reflexions sur la declamation_ of Herault de Sech.e.l.les contain a striking testimony to that wonderful command of expression, the result of a profound study of physiognomy, which enabled her, without opening her lips, to convey to her audience an exact impression of the different phases of emotion through which her mind happened to be pa.s.sing.
”One day, Mlle. Clairon seated herself in an arm-chair, and, without uttering a single word, she painted, with her countenance alone, all the pa.s.sions: hatred, rage, indignation, indifference, melancholy, grief, love, pity, gaiety. She painted not only the pa.s.sions themselves, but all the shades and differences which characterise them. In terror, for example, she expressed dismay, fear, embarra.s.sment, surprise, uneasiness. When we expressed our admiration, she replied that she had made a special study of anatomy, and knew what muscles it was necessary to call into play.”
And listen to Oliver Goldsmith's tribute, which appeared in the second number of _The Bee_:--
”Mlle. Clairon, a celebrated actress at Paris, seems to me the most perfect female figure I have ever seen on any stage. Her first appearance is excessively engaging; she never comes in staring round upon the company, as if she intended to count the benefits of the house, or, at least, to see as well as to be seen. Her eyes are always at first intently fixed upon the persons of the drama, and then she lifts them by degrees, with enchanting diffidence, upon the spectators.
Her first speech, or at least the first part of it, is delivered with scarce any motion of the arm; her hands and her tongue never set out together, but one prepares for the other.... By this simple beginning, she gives herself a power of rising to the pa.s.sion of the scene. As she proceeds, every gesture, every look, acquires new violence; till at last, transported, she fills the whole vehemence of the play and the whole idea of the poet. Her hands are not alternately stretched out and then drawn in again, as with the singing women at Sadler's Wells; they are employed with graceful variety, and every moment please with new and unexpected eloquence. Add to this, that their motion is generally from the shoulder; she never flourishes her hands while the upper part of the arm is motionless; nor has she the ridiculous appearance as if her elbows were pinned to her hips.”
But perhaps the most interesting of all eulogies of the actress is contained in a letter to Garrick by his Danish correspondent, Sturtz--a really masterly description, which suffers but little from the fact of the writer being a foreigner, and which we, therefore, need make no apology for producing at length:--
”In such a representing nation, I had a great opinion of their stage, and yet I was disappointed. It seems the quality has forestalled the best parts for them alone, for I saw but an indifferent medley of plays.
”There is, indeed, Mme. Clairon, standing alone amidst the ruins of the Republic, shooting for the last rays of a departing star. I have gazed on her when she trod the stage as Queen of Carthage,[166] worthy that rank and above the mob of queens; she inspired every sentiment; she displays every pa.s.sion, and, I dare say, she felt none: all the storm was on the surface, waves ran high, and the bottom was calm; her despair and her grief rose and died at the end of her tongue.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MADEMOISELLE CLAIRON
From an engraving by LAURENT CARS and JACQUES BEAUVARLET, after the painting by CARLE VAN LOO]
” ...She goes through a number of opposite feelings: soft melancholy, despair, languid tenderness, raving fury, scorn, and melting love; there is not one pa.s.sion absent. She is wonderful in those transitions where an inferior actress, from an intense grief, would, at some lucky event, jump on a sudden to a giddy, wanton joy. Mme. Clairon, though exulting at her new-born hope that aeneas might stay, keeps always the dark colour of sorrow; when her eye brightens through her tears, she looks, as Ossian expresses it, 'like the moon through a watery cloud.' Her characteristic perfection is the scornful, the commanding part; then is n.o.bility spread about her as a glory round the head of a saint; and yet she never puts off the woman; in the midst of violent rage she is always the tender female, and a _nuance_ of love softens the hard colour into harmony.
” ...Nature has done a good deal in favour of Madame Clairon; her voice is melody, of a vast extent, and capable of numberless inflexions; however, I was sometimes unwillingly disturbed by a disagreeable shrill cry, rather expressing physical pain. As to her figure, it is not a very elegant one, her head being rather too big and her whole person too little; and yet she is great, towering amongst the crowd in the height of action;[167] so as you see by the enchantment of art a colossal head of Jupiter in a cameo the size of sixpence. Were I in a temper to find fault with her, I might mention her too articulate declamation, the _cadence_ of every motion; but then I might as well charge Raphael with having too carefully marked his contours, which are the admiration and the models of every age. True it is that compound of excellence is a mere compound of art; were it possible to note action, as music, then she would show a fortnight before every mien, the measure of every tone, the tension of every march on paper. She is else quite free from that disagreeable tragical hiccup so epidemical in France, and so awkwardly returning at the end of every verse; she never shakes so affectedly her head, as some others, in what you call the graceful style, forsooth; and she alone may venture some bold strokes, which would never do else with so well-bred, so elegant an audience.
”So when she heard that all was lost, that aeneas was gone, then, in the rage of despair, with her two hands across, she beat her forehead with such a gloomy, death-threatening look that we all stood aghast, and her cry raised horror in every breast. I cannot say that she killed herself well, though, but she died well; her weakening voice was not a childish, whining tone, but imminent dissolution altered it, convulsion raised it, and so it vanished into the air as a vapour. There, then, I have brought her to the highest pitch of glory of your tribe, self-murder; may she now quietly repose!”[168]
And Garrick replies, laying his finger, with unerring instinct, upon the one weak spot in Mlle. Clairon's acting:--
”What shall I say to you, my dear friend, about 'the Clairon.' Your dissection of her is as accurate as if you had opened her alive; she has everything that art and a good understanding, with great natural spirit, can give her. But there I fear (and I only tell you my fears and open my soul to you) the heart has none of those instantaneous feelings, that life-blood, that keen sensibility, that bursts at once from genius, and, like electrical fire, shoots through the veins, marrow, bones, and all, of every spectator. Madame Clairon is so conscious and so certain of what she can do, that she never, I believe, had the feelings of the instant come upon her unexpectedly; but I p.r.o.nounce that the greatest strokes of genius have been unknown to the actor himself till circ.u.mstances and the warmth of the scene has sprung the mine, as it were, as much to his own surprise as to that of the audience. Thus I make a great difference between a great genius and a good actor. The first will always realise the feelings of his character, and be transported beyond himself; while the other, with great powers and good sense, will give great pleasure to an audience, but never
----”'Pectus inaniter angit, Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet, Ut magus.'
”I have with great freedom communicated my ideas of acting, but you must not betray me, my good friend; the Clairon would never forgive me, though I called her an excellent actress, if I did not swear by all the G.o.ds that she was the greatest genius too.”[169]
s.p.a.ce forbids us to give more than a brief account of the many triumphs of this superb _tragedienne_, who, besides worthily sustaining all the chief characters of the cla.s.sic repertoire, created forty-three roles, in not one of which did she fail to uphold her reputation, while the great majority were brilliantly successful. Among the former, she was probably seen to most advantage in Medee--in which character Carle Van Loo painted her in his celebrated portrait--Phedre, Hermione, Zen.o.bie, Didon, and Cleopatre. Among the latter, taking them in chronological order, should be mentioned Aretie in the _Denys le Tyran_ of Marmontel; Fulvie in Crebillon's _Catalina_; Azema in the _Semiramis_ of Voltaire; electre in the _Oreste_ of the same writer; Ca.s.sandre in Chateaubrun's play, _Les Troyennes_; Idame in Voltaire's _Orphelin de la Chine_; Astarbe in the tragedy of that name, by Colardeau; Amenade in the _Tancrede_ of Voltaire; and Alienor in De Belloy's _Siege de Calais_, during the run of which last play occurred the unfortunate incident which led to her retirement from the stage.
The almost fanatical admiration which Voltaire cherished for the actress was no doubt, in part, due to the fact that she had contributed so largely to the success of his plays. If Colle is to be believed, she ”made” his _Orphelin de la Chine_, while as the tender and fiery Amenade of _Tancrede_ (September 3, 1760), she appears to have held the audience absolutely enthralled. ”Ah! _mon cher maitre_,” writes Diderot to the exile of Ferney, ”if you could see her crossing the stage, half-leaning upon the executioners who surround her, her knees giving way beneath her, her eyes closed, her arms hanging down, as though in death; if you could hear her cry on recognising Tancrede, you would be convinced, more than ever, that silence and pantomime have sometimes a pathos which all the resources of oratory cannot attain. Open your portfolios and look at Poussin's _Esther paraissant devant l'a.s.suerus_: it is Clairon on her way to execution.”[170]
The _Mercure_--the staid _Mercure_, so chary of its praise--can find no word to describe her acting but that of sublime. The advocate Barbier, voicing the opinion of the average playgoer, declares that ”Mlle.
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