Unfortunately,however,a great actor cannot fill more than a very small fraction of the boards;and though Banquo's ghost will probably be more seasonable in his future apparitions,there are some more inherent difficulties in the piece.The company at large did not distinguish themselves.Macduff,to the huge delight of the gallery,out-Macduff'd the average ranter.The lady who filled the principal female part has done better on other occasions,but I fear she has not metal for what she tried last week.Not to succeed in the sleep-walking scene is to make a memorable failure.As it was given,it succeeded in being wrong in art without being true to nature.
And there is yet another difficulty,happily easy to reform,which somewhat interfered with the success of the performance.At the end of the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall insensible upon the stage.
This is a change of questionable propriety from a psychological point of view;while in point of view of effect it leaves the stage for some moments empty of all business.
To remedy this,a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about the prostrate king.A dance of High Church curates,or a hornpipe by Mr.T.P.Cooke,would not be more out of the key;though the gravity of a Scots audience was not to be overcome,and they merely expressed their disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses,a similar irruption of Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre from pit to gallery with inextinguishable laughter.It is,I am told,the Italian tradition;but it is one more honoured in the breach than the observance.With the total disappearance of these damsels,with a stronger Lady Macbeth,and,if possible,with some compression of those scenes in which Salvini does not appear,and the spectator is left at the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans,the play would go twice as well,and we should be better able to follow and enjoy an admirable work of dramatic art.
III -BAGSTER'S 'PILGRIM'S PROGRESS'
I HAVE here before me an edition of the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS,bound in green,without a date,and described as 'illustrated by nearly three hundred engravings,and memoir of Bunyan.'
On the outside it is lettered 'Bagster's Illustrated Edition,'and after the author's apology,facing the first page of the tale,a folding pictorial 'Plan of the Road'is marked as 'drawn by the late Mr.T.Conder,'and engraved by J.Basire.No further information is anywhere vouchsafed;perhaps the publishers had judged the work too unimportant;and we are still left ignorant whether or not we owe the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same hand that drew the plan.It seems,however,more than probable.The literal particularity of mind which,in the map,laid down the flower-plots in the devil's garden,and carefully introduced the court-house in the town of Vanity,is closely paralleled in many of the cuts;and in both,the architecture of the buildings and the disposition of the gardens have a kindred and entirely English air.Whoever he was,the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the best illustrator of Bunyan.They are not only good illustrations,like so many others;but they are like so few,good illustrations of Bunyan.Their spirit,in defect and quality,is still the same as his own.The designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream,as literal,as quaint,and almost as apposite as Bunyan's;and text and pictures make but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned story.
To do justice to the designs,it will be necessary to say,for the hundredth time,a word or two about the masterpiece which they adorn.
All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their creators;and as the characters and incidents become more and more interesting in themselves,the moral,which these were to show forth,falls more and more into neglect.
An architect may command a wreath of vine-leaves round the cornice of a monument;but if,as each leaf came from the chisel,it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall,and if the vine grew,and the building were hidden over with foliage and fruit,the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer of allegories.The FAERY QUEEN was an allegory,I am willing to believe;but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable verse.The case of Bunyan is widely different;and yet in this also Allegory,poor nymph,although never quite forgotten,is sometimes rudely thrust against the wall.Bunyan was fervently in earnest;with 'his fingers in his ears,he ran on,'straight for his mark.He tells us himself,in the conclusion to the first part,that he did not fear to raise a laugh;indeed,he feared nothing,and said anything;and he was greatly served in this by a certain rustic privilege of his style,which,like the talk of strong uneducated men,when it does not impress by its force,still charms by its simplicity.The mere story and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal favour.He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable of moving mountains.And we have to remark in him,not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely decorative invention,but the parts where faith has grown to be credulity,and his characters become so real to him that he forgets the end of their creation.We can follow him step by step into the trap which he lays for himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant literality of vision,till the trap closes and shuts him in an inconsistency.The allegories of the Interpreter and of the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains are all actually performed,like stage-plays,before the pilgrims.The son of Mr.Great-grace visibly 'tumbles hills about with his words.'