The Sun.
London, England, 1863-06-16 00:00:00

lord made several other statements proving the
real inefficiency of the blockade which yet continues
to impoverish our manufacturers and injure our
legitimate trade. How much longer this state of
things is to last may well be questioned, but the
Northern Government may thank the timidity or
lenity of our Government that the blockade has
been suffered to exist, if indeed anything can be
estimated an advantage which has tended to prolong
this miserable and fruitless war.

HER MAJESTY'S THEATRE,

MADAME RISTORI,

In the present wintry condition of our stage,
when its tragic and poetic power is almost reduced
to the verge of extinction—the visits of Madame
Ristori remind us of those of the Government agents
who yearly travel to the Siberian colonies, in order
to supply them with light and sustenance, and sus-
tain their spirit of allegiance. Without her we
' could almost fancy a true sense of a tragic ideal
would die out altogether. It is something as painful
as it is surprising to see how palpable she makes the
phenomenon of the decay of our histrionic talent—a
decay which is only to be explained by the fact of
our realistic and sensuous age that deteriorates art
in all directions, and which in the drama, replacing
a mental by a merely physical excitement, has
reduced our comedy to farce, and our tragedy to
melodrama. As it is the play that develops the
actor—that calls into being all that sympathetic and
imitative faculty which gives to the creation of the
poet the manifestation of the artist—and as this
relation necessarily holds in every phase the
drama assumes—the actor never rising above
the source of his inspiration—an age in which
Shakespear is only to be sustained by spectacle,
and theatres only rendered prosperous by
sensation pieces, such as the " Colleen Bawn"
and the " Peep 0' Day"—may well explain the
abasement of our long declining stage. It is a proof
as striking as it is humiliating that the only in-
stances in recent years in which it was felt that
histrionic art regained the splendour that irradiated
our own theatres, in other days, when they possessed
a Kean and a Macready, a Young and a Charles
Kemble—were in the persons of three foreigners—
Rachel, Ristori, and Mr. Fechter. These are circum-
stances little calculated to sustain our national com-
placency. Nor is their annoyance mitigated by any
prospect of a speedy removal of the stigma. An
entire change in public taste which must affect
the entire condition of the arts must be the
condition, we apprehend, of any sensible improve-
ment of the particular branch we are considering.
At the same time we must not be ungrateful for
the good with which we are favoured, and which
so largely alleviates the position that it serves to
make so palpable. We must duly estimate the
powers of our great Italian actress, which are so
adapted to keep alive in us our truest poetic sympa-
thies, and which can so well fulfil the double end
of supplying us with an ideal resource, and the
finest and rarest standard by which its enjoyment
should be tested. Madame Ristori comes before us as
no mere substitute for a lost power, which in the
impoverished condition of our time we ought to
be thankful for in any shape, she presents herself,
on the contrary, as its highest illustration, and
claims as much to be regarded in the light of a study
as a source of pleasure. No little credit, therefore,
is due to the taste and spirit of Mr. Mapleson, who,
wisely divining the want of our times, has placed
this great artist again before us, and who in his
announcement of her claims has given such further
proof of his own to be placed at the head of a na-
tional theatre. Nor is there a want of fitness in
her appearing on the boards of a Lyric Temple,
where the tragic element at present is in so much
force than at other houses, and where if the
space is somewhat too great to do justice to the
play of her features, the advantage for sound en-
sure the enjoyment of the minutest whisper
of her noble voice. Mdme. Ristori is en-
gaged for a series of eight representations,
none of which will be repeated, and commenced
them last night with the character that made her
genius known to Europe—that of Medea.
We are gratified in stating that her unrivalled
powers show no decline einc3 she last appeared
among ua, now some four seasons ago, but on the
contrary, an increase of concentration, and even
mentality, that many of her old observers would
have scarcely imagined possible. We need
hardly refer again to the old comparisons which
have been so frequently and often, we must
add, unjustly, instituted between herself and
Rachel—in respect to whom, if it can be said she
wants the electric energy and overwhelming pas-
sion, she as entirely surpasses in her pathos, her
variety, her consummate art, and her imagination.
As little occasion have we to dwell on the merits of
the play she appears in as a test of legitimate
power. After all the outcry that has been raised
against M. Legouve's version of Eurepides,
and its false colouring of French senti-
ment on the simple beauty of Greek
sculpture—it must be remembered that his
endeavour to give a romantic form to a classic
original was a transition that involved no ordinary
difficulties, and that in its chief respect his version
is to be regarded as highly meritorious, namely,
its entire displacement of the supernatural element
in favour of the human—by means of which
Medea not only ceases to revolt as a sorce
ress, whose aspect is much too terrible, but enlists
our sympathies as the wife and mother whom great
passion in the first instance had tempted into crime,
and great wrong in the second maddened into cruelty.
The dramatist with great skill has made Jason the
true criminal both in his abuse of Medea's affection
in the first place, and his desertion of her in the
second. Condensing admirably the expres-
sion of his purpose in the last energetic burst
he gives her, when on the slaughter of her chil-
dren she turns on him with the frantic and ter-
rible denunciation, Trc !

Madme. Ristori's performance last evening was a
most profound as well as affecting interpretation,
of this design. W e had the wife and mother before
us, as more sinned against than sinning, whose cha-
racter, if so entirely passionate, as to make it an
easy prey to crime—supplies, in this very source
the expiation of her guilt, in the more than ordinary
suffering which its retributions would impose on it.
Thus the painful and the terrible, whilst rounded
by her poetic expression of them into a sense of
beauty that makes them attractive, are still further
elevated by the moral aspect that her agonies
assume, when, deeply as they move our pity, they
make plain to us their justice. It is this double
power which confers on Madame Ristori her great
distinction—the ability to refine the terrible, how-
ever vehement, into the poetic, and the power, not
less conspicuous, of exhibiting its effect as either
purificatory or retributive.
We regret we have not space to illustrate
these remarks by a quotation of the numerous pas-
sages which we marked during the performance,
and must content ourselves with referring in proof
of her increase of power to both of her scenes with
Creusa, in evidence of the finer growth of
her deep-seated passion into hatred, a change
which ever struggles with conviction till
wrong and suffering afford her heart no
other outlet than in blood ; and in the scene also
with Jason, in which the terrible fear of his false-
hood strives to the last to indulge a hope of his
returning love and justice. The more marked
points of her performance were also stamped with
this concentration, such as the delivery of the image
of the leopard, the feeling that her love frightens
her children even on blessing them.

Sovente
For for paura coi mei stessi Abbraccia.

Her reference to the Eumenides, and the stamp 3f
murderess on her brow—

Il tartareo segnal the Giove on fronte,
Deli' omicida imprimi.
Her reminding Jason that their guilt is an insepa-
rable band of union, the finest passage in the play;
and lastly her great outburst on her rejection by
him, which so strangely and so worthiiy recalls
the memory of Edmund Kean.
Madame Ristori was warmly applauded through-
out this noble performance by a highly appreciat-
ing andience, was called for at the close of every
act,and at the end of the performance with the
loudest demonstration.