Mr. Fechter - Page 2

heroine
descended from her pedestal.

In Ruy Blas, in the Master of Ravenswood, and in the Lady of Lyons--
three dramas in which Mr. Fechter especially shines as a lover, but
notably in the first--this remarkable power of surrounding the
beloved creature, in the eyes of the audience, with the fascination
that she has for him, is strikingly displayed. That observer must
be cold indeed who does not feel, when Ruy Blas stands in the
presence of the young unwedded Queen of Spain, that the air is
enchanted; or, when she bends over him, laying her tender touch upon
his bloody breast, that it is better so to die than to live apart
from her, and that she is worthy to be so died for. When the Master
of Ravenswood declares his love to Lucy Ashton, and she hers to him,
and when in a burst of rapture, he kisses the skirt of her dress, we
feel as though we touched it with our lips to stay our goddess from
soaring away into the very heavens. And when they plight their
troth and break the piece of gold, it is we--not Edgar--who quickly
exchange our half for the half she was about to hang about her neck,
solely because the latter has for an instant touched the bosom we so
dearly love. Again, in the Lady of Lyons: the picture on the easel
in the poor cottage studio is not the unfinished portrait of a vain
and arrogant girl, but becomes the sketch of a Soul's high ambition
and aspiration here and hereafter.

Picturesqueness is a quality above all others pervading Mr.
Fechter's assumptions. Himself a skilled painter and sculptor,
learned in the history of costume, and informing those
accomplishments and that knowledge with a similar infusion of
romance (for romance is inseparable from the man), he is always a
picture,--always a picture in its right place in the group, always
in true composition with the background of the scene. For
picturesqueness of manner, note so trivial a thing as the turn of
his hand in beckoning from a window, in Ruy Blas, to a personage
down in an outer courtyard to come up; or his assumption of the
Duke's livery in the same scene; or his writing a letter from
dictation. In the last scene of Victor Hugo's noble drama, his
bearing becomes positively inspired; and his sudden assumption of
the attitude of the headsman, in his denunciation of the Duke and
threat to be his executioner, is, so far as I know, one of the most
ferociously picturesque things conceivable on the stage.

The foregoing use of the word "ferociously" reminds me to remark
that this artist is a master of passionate vehemence; in which
aspect he appears to me to represent, perhaps more than in any
other, an interesting union of characteristics of two great
nations,--the French and the Anglo-Saxon. Born in