Born in London of a
French mother, by a German father, but reared entirely in England
and in France, there is, in his fury, a combination of French
suddenness and impressibility with our more slowly demonstrative
Anglo-Saxon way when we get, as we say, "our blood up", that
produces an intensely fiery result. The fusion of two races is in
it, and one cannot decidedly say that it belongs to either; but one
can most decidedly say that it belongs to a powerful concentration
of human passion and emotion, and to human nature.
Mr. Fechter has been in the main more accustomed to speak French
than to speak English, and therefore he speaks our language with a
French accent. But whosoever should suppose that he does not speak
English fluently, plainly, distinctly, and with a perfect
understanding of the meaning, weight, and value of every word, would
be greatly mistaken. Not only is his knowledge of English--
extending to the most subtle idiom, or the most recondite cant
phrase--more extensive than that of many of us who have English for
our mother-tongue, but his delivery of Shakespeare's blank verse is
remarkably facile, musical, and intelligent. To be in a sort of
pain for him, as one sometimes is for a foreigner speaking English,
or to be in any doubt of his having twenty synonymes at his tongue's
end if he should want one, is out of the question after having been
of his audience.
A few words on two of his Shakespearian impersonations, and I shall
have indicated enough, in advance of Mr. Fechter's presentation of
himself. That quality of picturesqueness, on which I have already
laid stress, is strikingly developed in his Iago, and yet it is so
judiciously governed that his Iago is not in the least picturesque
according to the conventional ways of frowning, sneering,
diabolically grinning, and elaborately doing everything else that
would induce Othello to run him through the body very early in the
play. Mr. Fechter's is the Iago who could, and did, make friends,
who could dissect his master's soul, without flourishing his scalpel
as if it were a walking-stick, who could overpower Emilia by other
arts than a sign-of-the-Saracen's-Head grimness; who could be a boon
companion without ipso facto warning all beholders off by the
portentous phenomenon; who could sing a song and clink a can
naturally enough, and stab men really in the dark,--not in a
transparent notification of himself as going about seeking whom to
stab. Mr. Fechter's Iago is no more in the conventional
psychological mode than in the conventional hussar pantaloons and
boots; and you shall see the picturesqueness of his wearing borne
out in his bearing all through the tragedy down to the moment when
he becomes invincibly and consistently dumb.
Perhaps no innovation in Art was ever accepted with so much favour
by so many intellectual persons pre-committed to, and preoccupied
by, another system, as Mr. Fechter's Hamlet. I take this to have
been the case (as it unquestionably was in London), not because of
its picturesqueness, not because of its novelty, not because of its
many scattered beauties, but because of its perfect consistency with
itself. As the animal-painter said of his favourite picture of
rabbits that there was more nature about those rabbits than you
usually found in rabbits, so it may be said of Mr. Fechter's Hamlet,
that there was more consistency about that Hamlet than you usually
found in Hamlets.
